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... today all we have is a long, groping slavery to principles which don’t work;
can’t work; because some of Adam Smith’s axioms don’t even rise to the
level of common sense.--

Agrarian Justice

Agrarian Justice was a proposal for a citizen's income funded by an inheritance tax--

America

A nation of persistent and resilient people with an unshakable mission: the pursuit of
happiness. It is a nation of ambitious people with notions of unfettered future growth, a
nation that celebrates abundance. There seems to be no reason anyone should be deprived of
luxury, if he works hard. This is a flamboyantly optimistic and self-congratulatory
society.--

The United States is the wealthiest nation. But its 20.3 percent child
poverty rate ranks worse than all European nations... the gap between the wealthiest and
the poorest in America has become greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic
Rome.--

People refuse to see that the United States is a poor country. America is the poorest country on earth. America doesn't make anything anymore. Has no factories, no industries, and is deeply in debt. "We are only surviving, looking good, because of our military might, because we are an empire. This farce cannot keep going on forever, we're only clogging along with accounting fraud, embolding people to lend us money, sending us stuff that we don't deserve, we haven't earned."--

... the country's current moral and cultural collapse is caused by its ubiquitous embrace of illusion.--

The decline of America is a story of gross injustices, declining standards of living, stagnant or falling wages, long-term unemployment and underemployment, and the curtailment of basic liberties, especially as we militarize our police. It is a story of the weakest forever being crushed by the strong. It is the story of unchecked and unfettered corporate power, which has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our manufacturing base, bankrupted the nation, and plundered and contaminated our natural resources. Once communities break down physically, they break down morally.--

This country brags about being founded on freedom. It was founded on slavery. It was founded on holocaust. It was founded on genocide.--

Racist, violent and despotic forces have always been part of the American landscape and have often been tolerated and empowered by the state to persecute poor people of color and dissidents. These forces are denied absolute power as long as a majority of citizens have a say in their own governance. The corporate elites, however, frightened by what the political scientist Samuel Huntington called an “excess of democracy” that originated in the 1960s, methodically destroyed the democratic edifice. They locked the citizens out of government. And by doing so they made sure that power shifted into the hands of the enemies of the open society. When democratic institutions cease to function, when the consent of the governed becomes a joke, despots, cranks, conspiracy theorists, con artists, generals, billionaires and proto-fascists fill the political void. They give vent to popular anger and frustration while arming the state to do to the majority what it has long done to the minority. This tale is as old as civilization. It was played out in ancient Greece and Rome, the Soviet Union, fascist Germany, fascist Italy and the former Yugoslavia.--

America’s high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore. - Chris Hedges--

American Elections

The American presidential election is a drawn-out, byzantine process that involves precinct meetings, regional caucuses, state primaries and national conventions, all to give citizens the impression that their participation matters, for in the end, the lying buffoon who gets to stride into the White House has long been vetted and preselected by the banks, death merchants and brainwashing media that run our infernally corrupt and murderous country.
It's foolish to expect a system to allow anyone who threatens it to the least degree to rise to the very top, for all those who benefit from this system will do all they can to snuff out such a pest each step of the way. He'd be lucky to get a job teaching freshman English at the community college, and is as out of place in this bloody scheme as an Iowa beaver trapper at a Hamptons pool party. As for dissidents who get print space or airtime, they are but harmless, distracting foils or court jesters. Since voting cannot change the system but legitimizes it, voters become collaborators in all of the system's crimes, as well as their own destruction, for the system works against nearly all of them.--

American Imperialism

It noted that while American imperialism was the “cockpit of international war planning,” its actions were only the “most concentrated expression of the intractable crisis of capitalism as a world system.”--

Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war. - Chris Hedges--

American Left

There is no American left — not a left that has any kind of seriousness, that understands political or revolutionary theories, that’s steeped in economic study, that understands how systems of power work, especially corporate and imperial power. The left is caught up in the same kind of cults of personality that plague the rest of society. It focuses on Trump, as if Trump is the central problem. Trump is a product, a symptom of a failed system and dysfunctional democracy, not the disease.
The serious left in this country was decimated. It started with the suppression of radical movements under Woodrow Wilson, then the “Red Scares” in the 1920s, when they virtually destroyed our labor movement and our radical press, and then all of the purges in the 1950s. For good measure, they purged the liberal class—look at what they did to Henry Wallace—so that Cold War “liberals” equated capitalism with democracy, and imperialism with freedom and liberty. I lived in Switzerland and France. There are still residues of a militant left in Europe, which gives Europeans something to build upon. But here we almost have to begin from scratch.- Chris Hedges--

Much of the left was fooled by the identity politics trick. It was a boutique activism. It kept the corporate system, the one we must destroy, intact. It gave it a friendly face.--

Angel

"Angel" to the Essenes was a symbolic name for a cosmic or planetary force.--
ebs

Anger

Generally speaking, people who are really angry, angry personalities, there's been a
huge neglect or abuse in their life.--

Aristotle

Aristotelian writings, located consciousness or the abode of thought in and just above
the heart.--

Attentat

A strategy of revolution that came to be known in the 1880s as an attentat, or "propaganda by the deed."--

Authority/Authorization

The second and more important way that we control other people's
voice-authority over us is by our opinions of them. Why are we forever judging,
forever criticizing, forever putting people in categories of faint praise or reproof? We
constantly rate others and pigeonhole them in often ridiculous status hierarchies simply
to regulate their control over us and our thoughts. Our personal judgements of others are
filters of influence. If you wish to release another's language power over you, simply
hold him higher in your own private scale of esteem.--

We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and
tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope
gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us. And then to
rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization
that 'we' do not have.--

The real chasm was between the political authority of the church and the individual
authority of experience. And the real question was whether we are to find our lost
authorization through an apostolic succession from ancient prophets who heard divine
voices, or through searching the heavens of our own experience right now in the objective
world without any priestly intercession. As we all know, the latter became Protestantism
and, in its rationalist aspect, what we have come to call the Scientific Revolution.--

In the second millennium B.C., we stopped hearing the voices of gods. In the first
millennium B.C., those of us who still heard the voices, our oracles and prophets, they
too died away. In the first millennium A.D., it is their sayings and hearings preserved in
sacred texts through which we obeyed our lost divinities. And in the second millennium
A.D., these writings lose their authority. The Scientific Revolution turns us away from
the older sayings to discover the lost authorization in Nature.--

We, we fragile human species at the end of the second millennium A.D., we must become
our own authorization.--

Or in behaviorism, if less distinctly, in the undocumented faith that
it is the chaotic reinforcements of development and the social process that must be
controlled and ordered to return man to a quite unspecified ideal before these
reinforcements had twisted his true nature awry.--

With the loss of the analog 'I', its mind-space, and the ability to narratize,
behaviour is either responding to hallucinated directions, or continues on by habit.--

... behaviorism... gives to the individual adherent the talisman of control by
reinforcement contingencies by which he is to meet his world and understand its
vagaries.--

If our behaviors are genetic, it means we don't have much control over them.--

Biology promotes the opposite point, that we humans don't have much freedom because our behavior is controlled by our genes. Sociobiologists say even the functioning of our societies is constrained by our genes, so the idea of us choosing to expand our liberties is hilarious to them.--

We should not judge behaviour in another society by our own standards.--

Belief

It is a fact that belief, political or religious, or simply belief in oneself through
some earlier cognitive imperative, works in wonderous ways. Anyone who has experienced the
sufferings of prisons or detention camps knows that both mental and physical survival is
often held carefully in such untouchable hands.--

Behold the believers of all beliefs! Whom do they hate most? Him who breaketh up their
table of values, the breaker, the law-breaker: - he however, is the creator.--

Bicameral Mind

... the idea of right and wrong, the idea of a good man and of redemption from sin and
divine forgiveness only begin in this uneasy questioning of why the hallucinated guidances
can no longer be heard.--

... the belief in a world darkened with hostile demons, causing disease and misfortune,
can only be understood as an expression of the deep and irreversible uncertainty which
followed the loss of the hallucinated decisions of the bicameral mind.--

Biology

Biology promotes the opposite point, that we humans don't have much freedom because our behavior is controlled by our genes. Sociobiologists say even the functioning of our societies is constrained by our genes, so the idea of us choosing to expand our liberties is hilarious to them.--

Laissez-faire was the table-thumping cry of monopolistic big business in the 1860s through the 1920s; overlapping the Populist era, but on the capitalist side... it means government abstention from interference with individual action, especially commercial action.--

But laissez-faire is critical for today's aggressive corporations because they cannot operate at their gargantuan level without almost total freedom. Corporate businessmen cite as their biggest enemy, government. They see greed as a solution rather than a problem. They despise the push for equality as a death-knell. They refer to justice as something the envious dreamed up. For them democracy is no more than a bright tinsel wrapping to be torn off the moment it poses any real constraint around their freedom.--

One of the main events in capitalism is the creation of inequality... we notice these official speeches on foreign policy promise freedom, but they never promise equality. We cannot export equality. You cannot give away what you haven't got.--

Darwinists who held that inequality is an unavoidable fact of nature, so in
capitalism’s results, no guilt.--

The argument that everyone is free to rise to the top is dismantled in most
introductory sociology textbooks - although a student must usually wait until college to
read this. But the trick of flaunting possibility to mask actual probability is not a
casual device.--

"The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."--

'Humanity won't be happy', the enragés declared, 'until the last capitalist is hung with the entrails of the last bureaucrat.'--

Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.--

The failure of our capitalist democracy was collective. It was breed by ignorance, indifference, racism, bigotry, and the seduction of mass propaganda. It was breed by elites, especially in the press, in the courts, and academia who chose careerism over moral and intellectual courage. Our rights as citizens have been taken from us one by one. There was hardly a word of protest. America is rapidly devolving into a third world nation run by oligarchs, corporations, and militarized police. Our anemic democracy is being replaced by an authoritarian state led by a demigod who cares nothing about the rule of law. Tens of millions of people brutally controlled already live in perpetual poverty. This is a result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The goal is to make us all serfs on the corporate plantation.--

Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.--

Capitalism, Karl Marx wrote, is "a machine for demolishing limits." There is no internal sense of proportion or scale. Once all external impediments are lifted, global capitalism ruthlessly commodifies human beings and the natural world to extract profit until exhaustion or collapse.--

Capitalism, as Marx understood, when it emasculates government and escapes its regulatory bonds, is a revolutionary force. And this revolutionary force is plunging us into a state of neofeudalism, endless war, and more draconian forms of internal repression.--

Celebrity Culture

The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to drain us emotionally, confuse us about our identity, make us blame ourselves for our predicament, condition us to chase illusions of fame and happiness, and keep us from fighting back.--

Celebrity culture has leeched into every aspect of our culture, including politics, to bequeath to us what Benjamin DeMott called "junk politics". "Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them. "It's impatient with articulated conflict, enthusiastic about America's optimism and moral character, and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture," DeMott noted. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes - "meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage." It redefines traditional values, tilting "courage toward braggadocio, sympathy toward mawkishness, humility toward self-disrespect, identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains." Junk politics "miniaturizes large, complex problems at home while maximizing threats from abroad. It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals of its own public stances, often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized." And finally, it "seeks at every turn to obliterate voters' consciousness of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst."--

Change

... the universe is in a constant state of change and becoming, and that there is no moment of fixity, or being.--

Dominionism: Distortions and lies permeate the movement, which fends off criticism by encasing its followers in closed information systems and wrapping itself in Christian vestments and the American flag. The movement is marked not only by its obsessions with conspiracy theories, magic, sexual repression, paranoia and death, but also by its infatuation with apocalyptic violence and military force... Followers in the movement are locked within closed systems of information and indoctrination that cater to their hates and prejudices.--

The decline into dark ages coincided with the rise of Christianity. Collapsing under the Christian stranglehold, 6th Century Rome was repeatedly ravaged and looted. One million population was reduced to fifty thousand. The city lay in rubble and ruins. The Senate ceased for lack of qualified men. The hygiene, science and culture of Rome was abandoned as Christianity took hold.-- neo tech

... Nor is it the attitude of depreciation of the things of this world in the hope of future life, which distinguished medieval Christianity with its doctrine that the present life is but a mournful antechamber to the true life that is to come.--

Christianity's advice to slaves just to be good slaves.--

... traditional Christian dualism which sorts existence into good and evil with the
physical and earthly being regarded as a source of evil and goodness identified with pure
spirit and the life after death... Blake, Whitman and Nietzsche form a sort of triumvirate
whose influence runs through large swaths of modern literature in their rejection of
dualism and embrace of the body as good.--

Christian worldview, which is summed up in the parable of the prodigal son: a fallen
and sinful world with persons needing God the Father to forgive them.--

Christianity, the King remarked sardonically, was 'stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it'.--

Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.--

The idea that Christianity, or its various sects, is a mask invented by human beings for the purpose of carrying on struggles for power over others was among Paine's most original insights.--

Church

Rituals are behavioral metaphors, belief acted, divination foretold, exopsychic
thinking. Rituals are mnemonic devices for the great narratizations at the heart of church
life.--

Class War

--

Colonialism

see 'Wretched of the Earth, The' by Frantz Fanon

To destroy a people you must sever their roots.--

Complaining

Complaining is never of any use: it comes from weakness.--

Complaining about the complainers...

Commodity Culture

In a commodity culture, human beings are used, betrayed, and discarded.... Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity are useless assets when human beings are commodities. Those who do not achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve their fate.--

Commodity Markets

... the exploitation of natural resources does not tend to produce a stable, balanced economy. To the contrary. Commodity markets were and are subject to incessant devastating swings. This sort of economy almost invariably produces an extreme social divide between a few rich and many poor.--

Confidence

We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and
tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope
gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us. And then to
rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization
that 'we' do not have.--

Consciousness

"... consciousness... the sum total of mental processes occurring now."--

... consciousness is not a necessary part of the learning process.--

Consciousness functions in the decision as to what to say, how we are to say it, and
when we say it, but then the orderly and accomplished succession of phonemes or of written
letters is somehow done for us.--

... consciousness has no location whatever except as we imagine it has.--

... consciousness does not make all that much difference to a lot of our activities.--

... consciousness is a vocabulary.--

... we are never conscious of things in their true nature, only of the excerpts we make
of them.--

... consciousness is an operation rather than a thing, a repository, or a function. It
operates by way of analogy, by way of constructing an analog space with an analog 'I' that
can observe that space, and move metaphorically in it. It operates on any reactivity,
excerpts relevant aspects, narratizes and conciliates them together in a metaphorical
space where such meanings can be manipulated like things in space. Conscious mind is a
spatial analog of the world and mental acts are analogs of bodily acts. Consciousness
operates only on objectively observable things. Or, to say it another way with echoes of
John Locke, there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analog of something that was
in behavior first.--

The very practice of cruelty as an attempt to rule by fear is, I suggest, at the brink
of subjective consciousness.--

... the great majority of the terms we use to descibe our conscious lives are visual.
We 'see' with the mind's 'eye' solutions which may be 'brilliant' or 'obscure,' and so
on... it is our sense of space in a way that no other modality can even approach. And it
is that spacial quality, as we have seen, that is the very ground and fabric of
consciousness.--

Consciousness and morality are a single development. For without gods, morality based
on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell men what to do... --

Mind or soul or spirit or consciousness (all these were confused together).--

... that consciousness is a culturally learned event, balanced over the suppressed
vestiges of an earlier mentality, then we can see that consciousness, in part, can be
culturally unlearned or arrested.--

... why is it that in our daily lives we cannot get up above ourselves to authorize
ourselves into being what we really wish to be? The answer here is partly in the
limitations of our learned consciousness in this present millennium. We need some vestige
of the bicameral mind, our former method of control, to help us. With consciousness we
have given up those simpler more absolute methods of control of behaviour which
characterized the bicameral mind. We live in a buzzing cloud of whys and wherefores, the
purposes and reasonings of our narratizations, the many-routed adventures of our analog
'I''s. And this constant spinning out of possibilities is precisely what is necessary to
save us from behaviour of too impulsive a sort. The analog 'I' and the metaphor 'me' are
always resting at the confluence of many collective cognitive imperatives. We know too
much to command ourselves very far.--

The soul is social consciousness incarnate in the individual, and so it opposes the
body which is the foundation of our individuality.--

Conservative

Hearing that feelings of despair and inferiority are unequally distributed does not move conservatives. Under meritocracy, it is just deserts.--

Convictions

Men of fixed convictions do not count when it comes to determining what is fundamental
in values and lack of values. Men of convictions are prisoners.--

... the best thing for man to do was to hold all of his beliefs lightly and to reject
them whenever they began to appear as errors.--

Corporate State, The

The indifference to the plight of others and the cult of the self is what the corporate state seeks to instill in us. That state appeals to pleasure, as well as fear, to crush compassion. We will have to continue to fight the mechanisms of that dominant culture, if for no other reason than to preserve, through small, even tiny acts, our common humanity. We will have to resist the temptation to fold in on ourselves and to ignore the injustice visited on others, especially those we do not know. As distinct and moral beings, we will endure only through these small, sometimes imperceptible acts of defiance. This defiance, this capacity to say no, is what mass culture and mass propaganda seeks to eradicate. As long as we are willing to defy these forces, we have a chance, if not for ourselves, then at least for those who follow. As long as we defy these forces, we remain alive. And, for now, this is the only victory possible.--

The crisis we face is the result of a four-decade-long, slow-motion corporate coup that has rendered the citizen impotent, left us without any authentic democratic institutions and allowed corporate and military power to become omnipotent.... unless we dismantle that, we are doomed.--

Corporations

But laissez-faire is critical for today's aggressive corporations because they cannot operate at their gargantuan level without almost total freedom. Corporate businessmen cite as their biggest enemy, government. They see greed as a solution rather than a problem. They despise the push for equality as a death-knell. They refer to justice as something the envious dreamed up. For them democracy is no more than a bright tinsel wrapping to be torn off the moment it poses any real constraint around their freedom.--

... colossuses of indifference "of such power as to weaken government's ability to control them," so that "corporation now govern society perhaps more than governments do."--

"For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will eventually be."... every corporation's Achilles heel is concealed in its original incorporation papers.--

... management assumes that workers operate from a philosophy of self-interest. The next step is distrust, because management starts thinking the others will try to achieve its self-interest at company's expense... assumptions of self-interest eventually lead to fear... Naturally in fear-based groups there is no trust. Instead, owners and managers aggressively demand loyalty.--

Achilles heel of these massive companies is in their articles of incorporation. Under the law, a company's articles can be revoked and it has to cease doing business. Should 'three strikes' be applied to corporations as well? Some corporations do damage. Some are persistent violators of the public trust. Perhaps three convictions (or three public interest law suits lost) should be the limit, and their corporate articles revoked.--

Some corporations have now grown gigantic, actually becoming global forces with more
power and resources than some countries... they float above the world's constraints...
They are alien to the notion of democratic responsiveness, internal or external. In the
universe of corporations everything focuses on the acquisition of resources, labor, and
markets. These are the sources of power. Inside corporations Equality hides her face... In
democratic America most corporations are iridescent examples of autocracy, thriving on
soil where the Constitution guarantees everybody's freedom and equality... First, we are
all educated to look elsewhere, for instance to unchecked government, as the primary
threat to freedom. Second corporations make and sell our creature comforts, so we can't
tamper with them without threatening our prosperity. Third, we feel powerless. The
concentration of corporate power is inverse to people's feelings of personal power.
Fourth, we see no alternative.--

Their rules of engagement are Darwinian... corporation ownership of the media...
Corporations exist for profit, so the news has become a commercial product.--

We're in a historical shift. The modern activist is different. The rationale: culture today is driven by commercial advertising... conforming = rebelling... Peace = War, Slavery = Freedom... self-contradiction; you are able to both work for a company, and rebel against it. Corporate rebellion = loyalty... Go in, behave - and take over... The next revolution will be inside corporations.--

We have to grasp.... that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw people out of their homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.--

Corruption

Corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people.--

Creationism

Creationism is a key part of a system aimed at building a society that relinquishes the capacity to examine itself.--

Creative Thought

There are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is latter justified by logic... it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.--

Culture

As individuals we are at the mercies of our our collective imperatives. We see over our
everyday attentions, our gardens and politics, and children, into the forms of our culture
darkly. And our culture is our history. In our attempts to communicate or to persuade or
simply interest others, we are using and moving about through cultural models among whose
differences we may select, but from whose totality we cannot escape. And it is in this
sense of the forms of appeal, of begetting hope or interest or appreciation or praise for
ourselves or for our ideas, that our communications are shaped into these historical
patterns, these grooves of persuasion which are even in the act of communication an
inherent part of what is communicated.--

The very notion of truth is a culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive
nostalgia for an earlier certainty... the search for an innocence of certainty among the
mythologies of facts.--

People's values are shaped by the cultures they live in; as society changes we need
changed values.--

They cannot seem to get their minds around the idea that almost every nation in
Europeexpelled
its Jews wholesale at one time or another over the last 2,000 years. There is a reason
for that. Our interests in constructing a culture are diametrically opposed to their
objectives in infiltrating and altering another's culture. For just one example, objective
science and objective courtrooms were invented by us to get rid of personal and
even collective desires or tropisms which interfere with justice and truth.--

Darwinists who held that inequality is an unavoidable fact of nature, so in
capitalism’s results, no guilt.--

Death

Death: a release from impressions of sense, from twitchings of appetite, from
excursions of thought, and from service to the flesh.--

Death is a cessation from the impressions of the senses, the tyranny of the passions,
the errors of the mind, and the servitude of the body.--

"Well, I have really nothing to do with
death. While I am here, death is not. And when death will be here, then I will be not.
Therefore, I have nothing to do with death!"--ebs

... death is always "real suicide or rather murder committed by the soul upon the
body through ignorance or folly."--

Debt

Economic indebtedness takes away some of your
freedom, but many people who are affluent don't understand money traps.--

America is gradually returning to a "debt
peonage" society, after a practice in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were
forced to work for creditors.--

... legal loan sharks will eat us out from
within.--

Millions of Americans struggle and suffer trying
to make ends meet and find themselves diverted for life, paying debts.--

Deism

Deism. It threw away the church's "Word," despised its priests, mocked altar
and sacrament, and earnestly preached the reaching of God through reason and science.--

Democracy

... to work for someone, I will enter some sort
of hierarchy. And if I go to work for someone, somewhere, I am also selling my personal
freedom for a wage... So most work sites create the opposite of the two basic values of
democracy which are freedom and equality--

... the more people work, the more people are
enmeshed in a system of control which is nondemocratic... there seemed no purpose to the
authoritarianism of managers except to create a culture of extreme inequality... produced
the feeling of failure and shame... eventually workers think so little of their own worth
that they accept the low pay... "We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's
preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking
hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."--

... democracy cannot be advancing if its parts
are autocratic.--

Greed is the outstanding wrong because it reverses the utilitarian ethic. It produces
the greatest good for the smallest number. Democracy's founding virtues are freedom and
equality, so greed without restraint, producing great inequalities, becomes an
undemocratic force... a market's preferences for ensured scarcities, designed
inequalities, and increasingly segregated economic classes.--

Democracy, behind which hides the dictatorship of money, then opens the path to
Caesarism and the dissolution of the culture into total formlessness.--

... democracy is driven by money and therefore corrupt.--

Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. - Chris Hedges--

Democratic

There are no longer any major institutions in American society, including the media, the educational system, the financial sector, labour unions, the arts, religious institutions, and our dysfunctional political parties, that can be considered democratic. The intent, design, and function of these institutions, controlled by corporate money, are to bolster the hierarchical and antidemocratic power of the corporate state. These institutions, often mouthing liberal values, abet and perpetuate mounting inequality. They operate increasingly in secrecy. They ignore suffering or sacrifice human lives for profit. They control and manipulate all levers of power and mass communications. They have muzzled the voices and concerns of citizens. They use entertainment, celebrity gossip, and emotionally laden public-relations lies to seduce us into believing in a Disneyworld fantasy of democracy.--

Democratic Party

A genuine populism, one defined and often articulated by Bernie Sanders, could sweep the Democratic Party back into power. Regulating Wall Street, publicly financing campaigns, forgiving student debt, demanding universal health care, bailing out homeowners victimized by the banks, ending the wars in the Middle East, instituting a jobs program to repair our decaying infrastructure, dismantling the prison system, restoring the rule of law on the streets of our cities, making college education free and protecting programs such as Social Security would see election victory after election victory.
But this will never happen within the Democratic Party. It refuses to prohibit corporate money. The party elites know that if corporate money disappears, so do they. The party's hierarchy, pressured by Obama and the Clintons, elevated Tom Perez over Keith Ellison - whom a major donor to the party, Haim Saban, condemns as an "anti-Semite" because of Ellison's criticism of the Israeli government - to head the Democratic National Committee. They will press forward repeating the same silly slogans and trying to use the now ineffective Force choke on their political enemies. They may have lost control of the Congress and the White House and hold only 16 governorships and majorities in only 31 of the states' 99 legislative chambers, but they are incapable of offering any meaningful alternative to neoliberalism and empire. They are devoid of a vision. They can only moralize. They will continue to atrophy and enable the consolidation of an American fascism.--

This obsession with Russia is a tactic used by the ruling elite, and in particular the Democratic Party, to avoid facing a very unpleasant reality: that their unpopularity is the outcome of their policies of deindustrialization and the assault against working men and women and poor people of color. It is the result of disastrous trade agreements like NAFTA that abolished good-paying union jobs and shipped them to places like Mexico, where workers without benefits are paid $3.00 an hour. It is the result of the explosion of a system of mass incarceration, begun by Bill Clinton with the 1994 omnibus crime bill, and the tripling and quadrupling of prison sentences. It is the result of the slashing of basic government services, including, of course, welfare, that Clinton gutted; deregulation, a decaying infrastructure, including public schools, and the de facto tax boycott by corporations. It is the result of the transformation of the country into an oligarchy. The nativist revolt on the right, and the aborted insurgency within the Democratic Party, makes sense when you see what they have done to the country.
Police forces have been turned into quasi-military entities that terrorize marginal communities, where people have been stripped of all of their rights and can be shot with impunity; in fact over three are killed a day. The state shoots and locks up poor people of color as a form of social control. They are quite willing to employ the same form of social control on any other segment of the population that becomes restive.
The Democratic Party, in particular, is driving this whole Russia witch-hunt. It cannot face its complicity in the destruction of our civil liberties—and remember, Barack Obama’s assault on civil liberties was worse than those carried out by George W. Bush—and the destruction of our economy and our democratic institutions.
Politicians like the Clintons, Pelosi and Schumer are creations of Wall Street. That is why they are so virulent about pushing back against the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party. Without Wall Street money, they would not hold political power. The Democratic Party doesn’t actually function as a political party. It’s about perpetual mass mobilization and a hyperventilating public relations arm, all paid for by corporate donors. The base of the party has no real say in the leadership or the policies of the party, as Bernie Sanders and his followers found out. They are props in the sterile political theater.
These party elites, consumed by greed, myopia and a deep cynicism, have a death grip on the political process. They’re not going to let it go, even if it all implodes. - Chris Hedges--

A government or political system in which the ruler exercises absolute power.--

Paine grumbled, the world is bullied by rapscallion rulers bent on barbarizing their subjects. This despotism - Paine took aim especially at the monarchy of George III - makes individuals afraid to think and suspicious of others. The public exercise of reason is considered as treason, and individuals' natural rights (to free speech, public assembly, and freedom of religious affiliation, for instance) are hounded to the four corners of the earth.--

Despotism divides citizens into rich and poor and accustoms everybody to living in toadyish ways.--

"You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career," Vaclav Havel said when he battled the communist regime in Czechoslovakia:You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.... The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public. He offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin-and he offers It solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost."--

Dualism

... traditional Christian dualism which sorts existence into good and evil with the
physical and earthly being regarded as a source of evil and goodness identified with pure
spirit and the life after death.--

Blake, Whitman and Nietzsche form a sort of triumvirate whose influence runs through
large swaths of modern literature in their rejection of dualism and embrace of the body as
good.--

'Thou shalt not kill,' for life is given to all by God, and that which God has given,
let not man take away... the flesh of slain beasts in his body will become his own tomb.
For I tell you truly, he who kills, kills himself, and whoso eats the flesh of slain
beasts, eats of the body of death. For in his blood every drop of their blood turns to
poison; in his breath their breath to stink; in his flesh their flesh to boils; in his
bones their bones to chalk; in his bowels their bowels to decay; in his eyes their eyes to
scales; in his ears their ears to waxy issue. And their death will become his death. For
only in the service of your Heavenly Father are your debts of seven years forgiven in
seven days. But Satan forgives you nothing and you must pay him for all. 'Eye for eye,
tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot; burning for burning; wound for wound; life
for life, death for death. For the wages of sin is death. Kill not, neither eat the flesh
of your innocent prey, least you become the slaves of Satan. For that is the path of
sufferings, and it leads unto death.-- ebs

... if you eat living food the same will quicken you, but if you kill your food, the
dead food will kill you also. For life comes only from life, and death comes from death.--
ebs

... your body is that which you eat, and your spirit is that which you think.-- ebs

... live by the spirit, and resist the desires of the body.--

Economy

... pain and suffering are good because they goaded the poor into greater efforts, thus
the economy is energized.--

Education

"Everyone receives two kinds of education:
the one given him by someone else,
and the other, far more important,
which he gives himself."
-- ebs

The ideal life is one full of problems, but with the knowledge of how to solve them.

The basic purpose of education is to enable students to solve their individual problems
in the different areas of their lives. Education must be individual and adapted entirely
to the individual... A far more adequate educational system must develop the tendency of
cooperation instead of competition... Our very survival depends on whether great nations
will be able to cooperate instead of competing with each other.... The gradual development
of centralization in Western civilization has progressively disorganized the little
communities which previously existed in every country... steady disintegration of the
small community, and within the community, the family unit. These frameworks of human
cooperation have almost entirely disappeared and instead we have an exclusive
centralization of life based on the competitive tendency of the individual.-- ebs

The best educated person is not the one with the widest knowledge, but the one with the
best method of thinking... it is not the quality of knowledge which matters, but the
method with which that knowledge is applied. It is important to penetrate into the essence
of the correlations of phenomena with all-sided understanding... A well-balanced world
concept, in which the individual knows his place in the universe and life, is a solid
foundation on which he can firmly stand in all adversities and in all critical periods of
human history.-- ebs

... real education can be acquired only through empirical life-experience.--

We must start with the individual, and education is our salvation... help the
individual to help himself.--

Today's civilization has become intoxicated by the superficial glitter of technological
achievements. Our minds have become weakened by the crutches of technology and
technological noise has eroded our peace of mind.--

"There is no such thing as human nature," Janicka said to me. "Human nature is culture. It is a product of education. When you construct an educational system and a public discourse where there is an almost total lack of critical, analytical thinking, where you refuse to strengthen individual human beings capable of autonomous judgment, human beings aware of their experiences and feelings, responsible for their deeds and relationship to the other, you destroy what is fundamental to an open society. It becomes exclusively about collective image, meaning collective narcissism. Liberal pluralism from this perspective is viewed as moral relativism or nihilism.--

Egoism

... egoism... "man does everything for an end, namely, for that which is
profitable to him, which is what he seeks."--

Emotions

emotions... a degenerate form of reason.--

English

"The English are all alike; in every country they are rascals."--

Escrache

Escrache is a type of demonstration to publicly shame those who are above the law or who refuse to represent those who have elected them, usually by congregating around their homes, chanting and publicly shaming them.--

New developments bring with them changes in people's perception of right and wrong.
Furthermore, new developments create new ethical problems that society did not have to
face before.--

Equality

Ideals of human equality perpetuate mediocrity... Men are not equal... there is
struggle and inequality even in beauty, and war for power and supremacy...--

... each person will be his own chief ambition
and ultimate end.--

Poor people of all races now have little chance
of ever making it up to the middle class - for a complex of reasons including economic:
the loss of jobs as capitalism goes global; technological: the sudden demands of computer
skills at work; and attitude: Americans are really unsure of they want to provide equality
of opportunity, because they believe a market economy thrives better on inequality... they
are going to let poverty be a goad.--

... we practice inequality everywhere while pretending to equality.--

To tell men that they are equal has a certain sentimental appeal. But this appeal is small compared with that made by a propaganda that tells them they are superior to others, and that others are inferior to them.--

Evil

Evil exists not: only the past. The past is past, the present is a moment, the future
is all! - Zarathustra--

... to dispel evil not by attacking it but by maintaining and strengthening the good.--

... “what we call evil,” our reason teaches us that everything is in some way
related to and connected with every other thing, all notion of evil as being in the
universe of things is a contradiction, for if the whole comes from and is governed by an
intelligent being, it is impossible to conceive anything in it which tends to the evil or
destruction of the whole.--

"The greatest evildoers are those who don't remember because they have never given thought to the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back," Arendt wrote. "For human beings, thinking of past matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing ourselves, so as not to be swept away by whatever may occur - the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots, and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world."--

“Once more let me remind you what fascism is. It need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt–it may even wear a dress shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power and special privilege.” – Tommy Douglas, a founding member of The Council of Canadians--

... the melding of business and state - happens
to be one of the elements of fascism.--

"... a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."--

What is happening in America is revolutionary. A group of religious utopians, with the sympathy and support of tens of millions of Americans, are slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny, the springboard to an American fascism.--

Fascism grows when the economy declines.--

Fascism is a mass reactionary movement, financed by big business, but made up of primarily the desperate middle classes, and the lumpen proletariat and others of the most demoralized elements of the working class.--

Feminism

It is extremely important, obviously, that those voices are heard, but not those voices that have sold out to the power elite. The feminist movement is a perfect example of this. The old feminism, which I admire, the Andrea Dworkin kind of feminism, was about empowering oppressed women. This form of feminism did not try to justify prostitution as sex work. It knew that it is just as wrong to abuse a woman in a sweatshop as it is in the sex trade. The new form of feminism is an example of the poison of neoliberalism. It is about having a woman CEO or woman president, who will, like Hillary Clinton, serve the systems of oppression. It posits that prostitution is about choice. What woman, given a stable income and security, would choose to be raped for a living? Identity politics is anti-politics. - Chris Hedges--

Food

Instead of purity, freshness, and wholesomeness, the new post-war criteria for
desirable food became taste, texture, and shelf life. In geometrical progression ever
since, the greediness of the lethal food industry and the all-pervading sophisticated and
deceiving promotion of television and radio have become an omnipresent menace of
corruption to the public mind and body.-- ebs

Our most potent political weapon is food. If we take back our agriculture, if we buy and raise produce locally, we can begin to break the grip of corporations that control a food system as fragile, unsafe, and destined for collapse as our financial system. If we continue to allow corporations to determine what we eat, as well as how food is harvested and distributed, then we will become captive to rising prices and shortages and increasingly dependent on cheap, mass-produced food filled with sugar and fat. Food, along with energy, will be the most pressing issue of our age. And if we do not build alternative food networks soon, the social and political ramifications of shortages and hunger will be devastating.
"Food is the greatest place for communities to start taking back power," he said. "The national food system is collapsing by degrees.
"And it is clear to anyone who looks carefully at any crowd that we are wasting our bodies exactly as we are wasting our land," Wendell Berry observed in The Unsettling of America: Our bodies are fat, weak, joyless, sickly, ugly, the virtual prey of the manufacturers of medicine and cosmetics. Our bodies have become marginal; they are growing useless like our "marginal land" because we have less and less use for them. After the games and idle flourishes of modern youth, we use them only as shipping cartons to transport our brains and our few employable muscles back and forth to work.--

Fortunes

'Behind every fortune there's an undiscovered
crime.'--

Freedom

Economic indebtedness takes away some of your
freedom, but many people who are affluent don't understand money traps.--

"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground," Fredrick Douglass wrote: They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.--

French Enlightenment

... secularization of science, which is now a plain fact, is certainly rooted in the
French Enlightenment.--

Freud

Or in the Freudian emphasis on the deep-seatedness of neurosis in civilization and of
dreadful primordial acts and wishes in both our racial and individual pasts; and by
inference a previous innocence, quite unspecified, to which we return through
psychoanalysis.--

Friends

"in a friend one should have one’s best
enemy."--

Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism, Karen McCarthy Brown wrote, "is the religion of those at once seduced and betrayed by the promise that we human beings can comprehend and control our world. Bitterly disappointed by the politics of rationalized bureaucracies, the limitations of science, and the perversions of industrialization, fundamentalists seek to reject the modern world, while nevertheless holding onto these habits of mind: clarity, certitude, and control."--

The ideal existence for man, Zarathustra taught, is that of the gardener whose work
with the soil, air, sunshine and rain keeps him constantly contacting the forces of nature
and studying their laws.-- ebs

Geneology

A genealogy, on the other hand, of values, morals, knowledge, will never confuse
itself with a quest for their 'origins' but will cultivate the details and accidents that
accompany every beginning.--

"Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at
universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs
each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to
domination." The "successes of history", i.e. the winners of those struggles, are those who have used the rules against the rulers while disguised by those rules. Genealogy, then, is the recording of those moments in history at which rules were inverted against the rulers to begin a different domination. Genealogy sees the development of humanity as a series of interpretations.--

Globalism

Globalism is not just about exporting decent jobs, but also importing cheap labor until everyone everywhere makes just about nothing. That’s the master plan, dude, so although ningzin ser humano es ilegal (no human being is illegal) is self-evidently true, it's also a smoke screen to make slaves out of us all.--

God is the result of whatever the most energetic and heroic people value and create.
This is clearly very similar to Nietzsche's ideas about the sources of religion.
Nietzsche's notion of heroes as creators is at the heart of Kazantzakis' philosophy.--

"God is dead.' Nietzsche. 'Nietzsche is dead.' God."... "Some are born
posthumously.' Nietzsche."--

Good

... to dispel evil not by attacking it but by maintaining and strengthening the good.--

Good Deeds

The individual is to understand the importance of good deeds; he is to realize that his
personality, position and environment in life are the result of his past deeds, even as
his future will be exactly what his present deeds make it. He is therefore to strive at
all times to perform good deeds that express harmony with the laws of both nature and the
cosmos.-- ebs

Good and Evil

Concepts of good and evil are therefore, in their origin, merely a means to an end,
they are expedients for acquiring power.--

Christian moral values. He declared them to be, like all other morals, merely an
expedient for protecting a certain type of man. In the case of Christianity this type was,
according to Nietzsche, a low one.--

Conflicting moral codes have been no more than the conflicting weapons of different
classes of men; for in mankind there is a continual war between the powerful, the noble,
the strong, and the well–constituted on the one side, and the impotent, the mean, the
weak, and the ill–constituted on the other. The war is a war of moral principles. The
morality of the powerful class, Nietzsche calls NOBLE– or MASTER–MORALITY; that
of the weak and subordinate class he calls SLAVE–MORALITY. In the first morality it
is the eagle which, looking down upon a browsing lamb, contends that “eating lamb is
good.” In the second, the slave–morality, it is the lamb which, looking up from
the sward, bleats dissentingly: “Eating lamb is evil.”--

Government

... everything has simply become to big... The government merely takes money from the
citizens in the form of taxes and hands it back to them in the form of welfare, less the
paying of politicians and bureaucrats.-- ebs

... colossuses of indifference "of such
power as to weaken government's ability to control them," so that "corporations
now govern society perhaps more than governments do."--

"When it shall be said in any country in the world, 'My poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, the taxes are not oppressive; the rational world is my friend, because I am a friend of its happiness:' - when these things can be said," wrote Paine, "then may that country boast of its constitution and its government."--

"When people realize that it's not our government that is in charge of this country, it's the banks and big corporations, then this country might have some hope. It does not matter who we "vote" for. They are all owned. Privatization and stealing our natural resources are "their" goals. And they are doing it. Our governments control very little and are selling us out. Canadians will not wake up."--

Until such time as people reject the power of government to govern, to tax, to legislate, and to punish, war will never stop. War is the consequence of the government's power.--

Grass

When I touch grass, I touch infinity.--

Grief

"We shed no tears of grief; grief is for the naked lives of those who have made the world no better."--

Greed is the acquisition of a desirable good by one person or a group beyond
need, resulting in unequal distribution to the point others are deprived.--

If the consequences of greed are harm and pain, it is immoral. If greed is flaunted,
when the pain is known, it is also sociopathic.--

Greed is the outstanding wrong because it reverses the utilitarian ethic. It produces
the greatest good for the smallest number. Democracy's founding virtues are freedom and
equality, so greed without restraint, producing great inequalities, becomes an
undemocratic force... a market's preferences for ensured scarcities, designed
inequalities, and increasingly segregated economic classes... 'greed is the sin that's
good for the economy'.--

Happiness is difficult to find within ourselves, and impossible to find elsewhere.--
ebs

... money is not a reliable route to happiness. Happiness is based on other, internal factors.--

Harmony

... man has a thinking body, a feeling body, and an acting body. Our thoughts, our
feelings, and our actions all must act in harmony if we are to cooperate with each natural
and cosmic force... Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.-- ebs

... man unites in his body and spirit all the forces of nature and the cosmos in
perfect harmony... "Man is not alone in the universe - he is surrounded by infinite
powers of love and wisdom."

The individual is to realize the importance of good health for his own sake and for the
sake of others; and he is to practice all ways of improving his health, in thinking,
feeling, and acting.-- ebs

Health care

The simple truth, that single-payer, nonprofit health care for all Americans would dramatically reduce costs and save lives, that the for-profit health care system is the problem and must be destroyed, is censored out of the public debate by media that rely on these corporations as major advertisers and sponsors, as well as a morally bankrupt Democratic Party that is as bought off by corporations as the Republicans.--

Hebrew

The word for vagrants in Akkad, the language of Babylon, is khabiru, and so
these desert refuges are referred to on cuneiform tablets. And khabiru, softened
in the desert air, becomes hebrew.--

History see p.294 and 295 (OCBM)... Khabiru history... it is thus a question whether
the use of this variegated material as evidence for any theory of mind whatever is even
permissible.--

The Book of I Samuel

Khabiru, roaming outside the cities in the hills, speaking the voices they hear within
themselves but believe to come from outside them, answering the voices, using music and
drums to increase their excitement.--

Hinduism

... or the teaching of the Hindu sages, to whom the world is mere appearance, without
value.--

History

History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective
emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past.--

... history is impossible without the spatialization of time that is characteristic of
conciousness.--

The goal of the history, then, is not to narrate the story; to tell what
"really" happened, or to explain events accurately. Rather, the goal is to
produce an effect -- a change, a mutation in present ways of conceiving things by
explaining the past in new ways.--

Foucault argues that since history is never really over, the metaphysician can bend
history to suit his/her purposes with such a suprahistorical perspective. Genealogy thus
refuses any absolutes or constants -- another recognition of history as a material
practice rather than a disinterested record of events. "Events" for Foucault
consist of "the reversal of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the
appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who once used it"--

A genealogy, on the other hand, of values, morals, knowledge, will never confuse
itself with a quest for their 'origins' but will cultivate the details and accidents that
accompany every beginning.--

Hitler

The Wehrmacht Oath of Loyalty to Adolf Hitler, 2 August 1934

"I swear by God this sacred oath that I shall render unconditional obedience to Adolf
Hitler, the Führer of the German Reich, supreme commander of the armed forces, and that I
shall at all times be prepared, as a brave soldier, to give my life for this oath."--

Holocaust

American cartoonist Mike Flugennock's cartoon asks: "What has Ariel Sharon learned
from the Holocaust?" It shows bulldozers razing Palestinian homes and an Israeli
soldier pointing a gun at a Palestinian protester's head, above Flugennock's answer to his
own question: "Humiliation, tyranny, brutality and murder."--

"The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle... " Frederick Douglass said. "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."--

Human Nature

"There is no such thing as human nature," Janicka said to me. "Human nature is culture. It is a product of education. When you construct an educational system and a public discourse where there is an almost total lack of critical, analytical thinking, where you refuse to strengthen individual human beings capable of autonomous judgment, human beings aware of their experiences and feelings, responsible for their deeds and relationship to the other, you destroy what is fundamental to an open society. It becomes exclusively about collective image, meaning collective narcissism. Liberal pluralism from this perspective is viewed as moral relativism or nihilism.--

Humanity

Humanity won't be happy until the last capitalist is hung by the entrails of the last bureaucrat.--

Hypnosis

The hypnotized subject is not living in a subjective world. He does not introspect as
we do, does not know he is hypnotized, and is not constantly monitoring himself as, in an
unhypnotized state, he does.--

... hypnosis is a reliance on right hemisphere categories.--

Hypnosis is in part a vestige of a preconscious mentality...--

... in hypnosis it is as if someone else were doing things through us.--

Work for a great idea, and you arouse ideas in your own mind. Great ideas produce great
thoughts, and great thoughts produce greatness in humanity. A person is exactly what one
thinks oneself to be. Therefore, the one who thinks great thoughts must necessarily attain
greatness, and the simplest way for anyone to form the habit of thinking great thoughts is
to work for great ideas.--

The job of self-improvement must be carried on day by day, by the individual himself...
Every person is to use every moment to further his progress in life and it is a job which
no one can do for him.--

... few people today have even the slightest degree of self-knowledge. People live in
company of themselves all their lives without knowing the least thing about their real
selves.-- ebs

As individuals we are at the mercies of our our collective imperatives. We see over our
everyday attentions, our gardens and politics, and children, into the forms of our culture
darkly. And our culture is our history. In our attempts to communicate or to persuade or
simply interest others, we are using and moving about through cultural models among whose
differences we may select, but from whose totality we cannot escape. And it is in this
sense of the forms of appeal, of begetting hope or interest or appreciation or praise for
ourselves or for our ideas, that our communications are shaped into these historical
patterns, these grooves of persuasion which are even in the act of communication an
inherent part of what is communicate which individualism flourishes, and narcissism, ego, materialism, the pursuit of self, wealth, status and greed - but nothing that moves the masses together.--

... necessity for the individuals to overcome their social training and traditional
ideas to seek their own way.--

The soul is social consciousness incarnate in the individual, and so it opposes the
body which is the foundation of our individuality.--

Industrial Civilization

Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to stop this.--

Institutions

"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind...
As new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with
the circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times."--

Intellectuals

Chomsky reserves his fiercest venom for the liberal elite in the media, the universities, and the political system, which serve as smoke screens for the cruelty of unchecked capitalism and imperial war. He exposes their moral and intellectual posturing as a fraud.
"Most intellectuals have a self-understanding of themselves as the conscience of humanity," said the Middle East scholar Norman Finkelstein:
They revel in and admire someone like Vaclav Havel. Chomsky is contemptuous of Havel. Chomsky embraces the Julien Benda view of the world. There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If you pursue truth and justice, it will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege, it will always be at the expense of truth and justice. Benda says that the credo of any true intellectual has to be, as Christ said, "My kingdom is not of this world." Chomsky exposes the pretenses of those who claim to be the bearers of truth and justice. He shows that in fact these intellectuals are the bearers of power and privilege and all the evil that attends it.--

Intellectualism

... the modern intellectual landscape is informed with the same needs, and often in its
larger contours goes through the same quasi-religious gestures, though in a slightly
disguised form. These scientisms, as I shall call them, are clusters of scientific ideas
which come together and almost surprise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific
mythologies which fill the very void left by the divorce of science and religion in our
time. They differ from the classical science and its common debates in the way they evoke
the same response as did the religions which they seek to supplant. And they share with
religions many of their most obvious characteristics: a reational splendor that explains
everything, a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly visible and
beyond criticism, a series of canonical texts which are somehow outside the usual arena of
scientific criticism, certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation, and a
requirement of total commitment. In return the adherent receives what the religions had
once given him more universally: a world view, a hierarchy of importances, and an auguring
place where he may find out what to do and think, in short, a total explanation of man.
And this totality is obtained not by actually explaining everything, but by an encasement
of its activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention, such that everything that
is not explained is not in view.--

Inverted Totalitarianism

A system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics trumps politics.--

Its not classical totalitarianism, it doesn't find its expression through a demigod or charismatic leader but through the anonymity of a corporate state. That in Inverted Totalitarianism you have a system by which corporate forces proport to pay loyalty to the constitution, electoral politics, the iconography and language of American patriotism and yet have so corrupted the levers of power as to render the citizenry powerless.--

The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin uses the term inverted totalitarianism in his book Democracy Incorporated to describe our political system. Inverted totalitarianism, the sophisticated technologies of corporate control, intimidation, and mass manipulation, which far surpass those employed by previous totalitarian states, are effectively masked by the glitter, noise, and abundance of a consumer society. Political participation and civil liberties are gradually surrendered. Corporations, hiding behind this smokescreen, devour us from the inside out. They have no allegiance to the country.--

Inverted totalitarianism is a term coined by political philosopher Sheldon Wolin in 2003 to describe the emerging form of government of the United States. Wolin believed that the United States is increasingly turning into an illiberal democracy, and uses the term "inverted totalitarianism" to illustrate similarities and differences between the United States governmental system and totalitarian regimes such as Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. In Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco, inverted totalitarianism is described as a system where corporations have corrupted and subverted democracy and where economics trumps politics. In inverted totalitarianism, every natural resource and every living being is commodified and exploited to collapse as the citizenry is lulled and manipulated into surrendering their liberties and their participation in government through excess consumerism and sensationalism.--

They cannot seem to get their minds around the idea that almost every nation in
Europeexpelled
its Jews wholesale at one time or another over the last 2,000 years. There is a reason
for that. Our interests in constructing a culture are diametrically opposed to their
objectives in infiltrating and altering another's culture. For just one example, objective
science and objective courtrooms were invented by us to get rid of personal and
even collective desires or tropisms which interfere with justice and truth.--

Wealth is created by the concentration of human labour; usually one people produce labour, and others concentrate it. This is called "the division of labour" by contemporary wise people.--

Language

Language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.-- ocbm (pg.50)

The language of men was involved with only one hemisphere in order to leave the other
free for the language of gods.--

Law

Consciousness and morality are a single development. For without gods, morality based
on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell men what to do... It is now
moral right that must be fitted together with might in government and which is the basis
of law and lawful action.--

"Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind...
As new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with
the circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times."--

"We operate under two systems of law," said Kurski. "One is constitutional and legal. The other is unconstitutional and illegal. The problem is that the illegal and unconstitutional system runs the country."--

The Law

All that is, concrete or abstract, material or immaterial, visible or invisible, is
ruled by law, the One Law.--

The Law guides us in every problem, through every obstacle, telling us always the
perfect solution.--

Everything operates under one law. There is no static point in nature or man... the Law
manifests in perpetual change... a plant, a tree, a human body or solar system each has
its own laws, mathematical, biological and astronomical. But the one supreme power, the
Law, is behind all of them... Every human being is an individualized part of the unity.
This unity is the Law, the Eternal Light.--

In latter Essene traditions the abstract idea of the Law was conveyed by the symbol of
a tree, called the Tree of Life.--

... the path of learning to live in harmony with the laws of life, of nature and the
cosmos.--

Learning

Let the learning go on without your being too conscious of it, and it is all done more
smoothly and efficiently.--

Leisure Class

The institution of a leisure class hinders cultural development immediately (1) by the
inertia proper to the class itself, (2) through its prescriptive example of conspicuous
waste and of conservatism, and (3) indirectly through that system of unequal distribution
of wealth and sustenance on which the institution itself rests.--

The salient characteristic of the barbarian culture is an unremitting emulation and
antagonism between classes and between individuals.... Where life is largely a struggle
between individuals within the group, the possession of the ancient peaceable traits in a
marked degree would hamper an individual in the struggle for life.--

The liberal class, ranging from Hollywood and the Democratic leadership to The New York Times and CNN, refuses to acknowledge that it sold the Democratic Party to corporate bidders; collaborated in the evisceration of our civil liberties; helped destroy programs such as welfare, orchestrate the job-killing North American Free Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, wage endless war, debase our public institutions including the press and build the world's largest prison system.--

Liberal institutions, especially the press, function, as the journalist and author Matt Taibbi says, as "the guardians" of the neoliberal and imperial orthodoxy. It is the job of the guardians of orthodoxy to plaster over the brutal reality and cruelty of neoliberalism and empire with a patina of civility or entertainment. They pay homage to a nonexistent democracy and nonexistent American virtues.--

The liberal class, by embracing neoliberalism and refusing to challenge the imperial wars, empowered the economic and political structures that destroyed our democracy and gave rise to Trump.--

Fyodor Dostoevsky excoriated Russia's bankrupt liberal class at the end of the 19th century. Russian liberals mouthed values they did not defend. Their stated ideals bore no relationship to their actions. They were filled with a suffocating narcissism.
In "Notes From Underground," Dostoevsky lampooned the defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who preached goodness but lived in moral squalor. These defeated dreamers denounced the social and cultural depravity they had largely created. They had an open disdain for the uneducated, the poor, the working class, the lesser breeds beneath them. And in the end they ushered in a moral nihilism to empower a dangerous class of demagogues, killers and fools.
"I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect," the Underground Man wrote. "And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent man of the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure—primarily a limited being."--

Liberty

... liberty is an invention of the middle classes.--

Lies

You've been lied to about everything!
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot unlearn the many lies they've been taught to believe. (see Lies.jpg)--

Life

Let us unite all the forces of Life against the forces of death.--

Life thrives on conflict and self-overcoming.--

An unexamined life is not worth living.-- Socrates

The job of self-improvement, must be carried on day by day, by the individual
himself... few people today have even the slightest degree of self-knowledge. People live
in company of themselves all their lives without knowing the least thing about their real
selves.-- ebs

Every person is to use every moment to further his progress in life and it is a job no
one can do for him.-- ebs

For life is not the exclusive privilege of our planet, which is a tiny point in our
solar system, which is a tiny point in our galaxy, which is a tiny point in the
ultra-galactic system, which is a tiny point in the known universe, and an even tinier
point in the unknown universe. Therefore, it would be megalomania to think that life
exists only on our planet. Life exists on billions of other constellations, for the
universe is a mind-staggering infinity.-- ebs

... to live in it in voluntary simplicity and spiritual awareness of nature, combined
with intellectual creativity, leads to a symbiosis with Nature, the Spiritual, and
Culture.--

Life permanently creates new problems and needs in every age of human life. The real
education is to learn how to deal with these problems, and to learn how to satisfy all the
needs by these different periods of life... the ideal life is one full of problems, but
with the knowledge of how to solve them.--

Logic

An elementary rule of logic is that when there is a contradiction anywhere within a
theorem, the whole theorem is false.--

One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul - in
contempt...--

"Man is not alone in the universe - he is surrounded by infinite powers of love
and wisdom."--

Marketplace

The belief that human beings and human societies should be ruled by the demands of the marketplace is utopian folly. There is nothing in human history or human nature that supports the idea that sacrificing everything before the free market leads to a social good. And yet we have permitted this utopian belief system to determine how we structure our economy, labor, education, culture, and our relations with foreign nations, as well as how we treat the ecosystem on which we depend for life.--

Marx

Marx's assumption of a lost "social childhood of mankind where mankind unfolds in
complete beauty," so clearly stated in his earlier writings, an innocence corrupted
by money, a paradise to be regained.--

Mass Culture

It is the ability, denied to the specialist, to turn 'personal troubles into social issues, as Mills wrote, to "see their relevance for his community and his community's relevance for them" that should be the culmination of artistic and intellectual vision. Many trapped in mass culture are "gripped by personal troubles, but they are not aware of their true meaning and source." And it is the task of the artist or the intellectual to "translate troubles into issues and issues into terms of their human meaning for the individual." The failure to make knowledge and artistic expression relevant to human reality - the goal of the Bauhaus movement in Weimar Germany - has left the public unable to "see the roots of his own biases and frustrations, nor think clearly about himself, nor for that matter about anything else."--

Materialistic

... we are so materialistic poverty now actually
carries the shame that cowardice carried in earlier, warrior times.--

... four main types of divination: omens, sortilege, augury, and spontaneous
divination... they became the important media of decision only after the
breakdown of the bicameral mind.--

... This type of rare and heavily publicized humane event, fed to a sensation-hungry press, creates a "sufficiency paradox", an "illusion of sufficiency" (46) that
the goodness is there for us all. Generalized, this creates the illusion of abundance. The
media deal in demonstrations of sudden and spectacular humanity. But for every person who
gets the rare benefit, many others do not. A life-saving kidney goes to one of several
people in need, and the life-taking decision about the others is not publicized. The
"illusion of sufficiency" device massively confuses possibility with probability but on a societal level, it is a media-promoted and effective manipulation of hope... We too use Potemkin villages.--

Television news viewers are carpet-bombed with advertising... blacking out certain topics... Social class issues are avoided... Programs about the poor are rare... "media firms effectively write off the bottom 15-50 percent of society."... make how the media are used a political issue... 1% tax on advertising... subsidize the nonprofit media.--

Advertising... occupy the drive and psyche of the nation with wants, so that the nation will spend... television is filled with cacophonous distraction... Contradictions are withheld in the news... new technology is lionized in commercials. But technology itself is amoral... Difficult topics encourage thought, and they take time away from commercials.--

Television both provokes fear and promises ecstasy in ultra short attention spans... What is shown in commercials is overflowing abundance, specifically in terms of climactic moments... human effort is noisily trivialized in commercials. This is the narcotic. Television lathers a bright, noisy blur over anything like sustained effort, perseverance, focused long term goals, and over a society with chronic stresses.

The evening news systematically distorts normal time. Downtown riots in Seattle are given less than a minute (some of which is the reporter's talking face), shift to shots of a dog frolicking in a fountain, shift to minutes of a freeway chase. The picturesque is pursued, the serious is trivialized.

These are moves in a war against logic. And if you watch television, you are having your thinking disrupted. The busy-ness of rapid shifts of focus, the effervescent color, the edgy, dramatic music, all make it difficult for viewers to build independent ideas.--

... advertising is now accepted as if it was information... we live life by the method of comparisons... Television grows envy in us, and the fix is to acquire... Greed, is all about the sudden and spectacular. Advertising serves the sudden and spectacular... television churns routine optimism into its daily programming.--

We're in a historical shift. The modern activist is different. The rationale: culture today is driven by commercial advertising... conforming = rebelling... Peace = War, Slavery = Freedom... self-contradiction; you are able to both work for a company, and rebel against it. Corporate rebellion = loyalty... Go in, behave - and take over... The next revolution will be inside corporations.--

Media manufacture our consent - they tell us what those in power need them to tell us, so we can fall in line.--

If an event is never broadcast, it somehow never happened. The electronic image is the word of God. The corporate state controls most of what is seen and heard on television, what ideas and events can be discussed in the mainstream media and what orthodoxies, including neoliberalism and the war industry, must never be questioned. We suffer an intellectual tyranny as pervasive as that imposed by fascism and communism. Trump, who is as gullible as the most habitual television viewer, exemplifies our cultural and political death. He is no more "authentic" than Hillary Clinton. But he appears on our screens as more authentic because he is more deeply embedded in the medium that controls our thoughts. He is what is vomited up from the perverted zeitgeist of a nation entranced and dominated by electronic hallucinations.--

The media hold up the false ideals of impartiality and objectivity to mask their complicity with power.--

Hell is the American mainstream media earnestly beaming charades, mirages and spins 24/7.--

Medical Materialism

Medical Materialism, taking to itself some of the forms and all of the fervor of the
religions eroding around it.--

Through our diligent practice of Biogenic Meditation, little by little we are able to
put out of our minds the "Grand Central Station" of the twentieth century, all
the harsh invasion of technology and man-created cacophony. Then, at last, we are one with
the Peace of Nature, with the great primeval peace of the biogenic lifestream.--

Memory

He now considered memory (along with judgment and imagination) as one of the "three great faculties of the mind."--

Mental Health

Overcoming feelings of guilt is an important step to mental health.--

Meritocracy

In America the idea that anybody should be able to rise is old, and a person's position has always depended more on ability and accomplishments. This is meritocracy. Meritocracy seems more democratic. It is appealing because it seems to be all about self-steered destiny... But by the same token, meritocracy introduces blame for low rank. If you haven't accumulated accomplishments during your life, your low rank is a moral problem because you were free and you had the chance.--

Middle-class Americans, who believe in meritocracy, and who cling to myths of self-reliance and freedom, find it difficult to accept the idea of these "poverty traps"- middle class people are always pointing to an ancestor of theirs a century ago who worked their way up from the slums to success - but those were times when education was not a requisite. With today's technology a poor education really is a suffocating disability.--

Hearing that feelings of despair and inferiority are unequally distributed does not move conservatives. Under meritocracy, it is just deserts.--

Meritocracy is a system in which some must fail.-

Metaphier

Applied to the world as representative of all the world, facts become
superstitions. A superstition is after all only a metaphier grown wild to serve a need to
know.--

Metaphor

There are thus always two terms in a metaphor, the thing to be described, which I shall
call the metaphrand, and the thing or relation used to elucidate it, which I
shall call the metaphier.--

... it is by metaphor that language grows... The grand and vigorous function of
metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more
and more complex.--

Military

The brutality of Matthew Shepard's killers, who beat him to death for being gay, is a product of a culture that glorifies violence and sadism. It is the product of a militarized culture. We have more police, prisons, inmates, spies, mercenaries, weapons, and troops than any other nation on earth. Our military, which swallows half of the federal budget, is enormously popular - as if it is not part of government. The military values of hyper-masculinity, blind obedience, and violence are an electric current running through reality television and trash-talk programs where contestants endure pain while they betray and manipulate those around them in a ruthless world of competition. Friendship and compassion are banished.

This hyper-masculinity is at the core of pornography, with its fusion of violence and eroticism, as well as its physical and emotional degradation of women. It is an expression of the corporate state, where human beings are reduced to commodities and companies have become protofascist enclaves devoted to maximizing profit. Militarism crushes the capacity for moral autonomy and differences. It isolates us from each other. It has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, our mentally ill, our unemployed, our sick, and, yes, our gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual citizens.--

Millennials

American youths feel they must ingest to endure an absurd present and rudderless future, as wrecked by their elders.--

Modern man's building of cities is in entire variance with nature. The city's stone and
concrete walls are the symbols of man's separation from nature, of his aggressive way of
life with its urges to subjugation of others and to constant competition, one with
another. His present centralized, technical and mechanized life creates a chasm separating
him from nature, a chasm which never was wider or deeper.
Unity with nature is the foundation of man's existence on the planet.-- ebs

... Nor, lastly, is it the attitude of superficiality and indifference shown by modern
man in the face of the great problems of life.--

... the modern intellectual landscape is informed with the same needs, and often in its
larger contours goes through the same quasi-religious gestures, though in a slightly
disguised form. These scientisms, as I shall call them, are clusters of scientific ideas
which come together and almost surprise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific
mythologies which fill the very void left by the divorce of science and religion in our
time. They differ from the classical science and its common debates in the way they evoke
the same response as did the religions which they seek to supplant. And they share with
religions many of their most obvious characteristics: a reational splendor that explains
everything, a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly visible and
beyond criticism, a series of canonical texts which are somehow outside the usual arena of
scientific criticism, certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation, and a
requirement of total commitment. In return the adherent receives what the religions had
once given him more universally: a world view, a hierarchy of importances, and an auguring
place where he may find out what to do and think, in short, a total explanation of man.
And this totality is obtained not by actually explaining everything, but by an encasement
of its activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention, such that everything that
is not explained is not in view.--

... this is not the fatalistic outlook of the Mohammedan whereby everything is written
in advance, so that it is useless to try to change it.--

Money

Men do not envy the gifts of others, their skill, or the love of their women; they only
envy each others' money.--

... money is not a reliable route to happiness. Happiness is based on other, internal factors... the more people focus on financial and materialistic goals, the lower their feeling of well-being.--

Morality

... all morality to be a mere means to power.--

"Expressed in a formula, one might say: all the means by which one has so
far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral."--

The means by which morality is enforced are actually immoral. Morality attempts to
‘improve’ human beings by weakening and subjugating them.--

Consciousness and morality are a single development. For without gods, morality based
on a consciousness of the consequences of action must tell men what to do...--

bioethics... moral behaviour toward non-human living creatures.--

And there are times when taking a moral stance, perhaps the highest form of patriotism, means facing down the community, even the nation.--

Multiculturalism

... motley of political impotents, whose urbanization and ethnic diversity has stranded
them without roots. note: multiculturalism: the poor and marginalized masses huddled
together in despair and impotency... plentiful supply of slave labour!--

Music

... the very name of music comes from the sacred goddesses called Muses.--

The Mexican poor have joined this tidal wave courtesy of Bill Clinton's NAFTA, which permitted the huge agrobusinesses in the United States to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn. This swiftly bankrupted millions of small Mexican farmers, perhaps two million of whom joined the surge of undocumented immigrants into the United States.--

Nationalism

Paine nevertheless failed to see that the struggle for national self-determination constantly risks seduction by power-hungry nationalism. Like other ideologies, nationalism is a power-grabbing, potentially dominating form of life that feeds upon a preexisting sense of nationhood but in so doing disfigures it into a bizarre parody of itself. Nationalism is a pathological form of national identity. It has a fanatical core that destroys the heterogeneity of a nation by squeezing it into the Nation. Nationalism requires its adherents to believe in themselves and to believe that they are members of a superior community of believers known as the Nation. Nationalism tends to crash into the world, crushing or throttling everything that crosses its path, defending or claiming territory, always thinking of land as power and its native inhabitants as a clenched fist. Nationalists are driven by the feeling that all nations are caught up in an animal struggle for survival and that only the fittest survive. Nationalism revels in macho glory and fills the national memory with stories of noble ancestors, heroism, and bravery in defeat. It feels itself invincible, tracks down enemies, despises foreigners, waves the flag, and, if necessary, eagerly bloodies its hands on its enemies.--

Nature

Modern man's building of cities is in entire variance with nature. The
city's stone and concrete walls are the symbols of man's separation from nature, of his
aggressive way of life with its urges to subjugation of others and to constant
competition, one with another. His present centralized, technical and mechanized life
creates a chasm separating him from nature, a chasm which never was wider or deeper...
unity with nature is the foundation of man's existence on the planet.-- ebs

... to live in it in voluntary simplicity and spiritual awareness of nature, combined
with intellectual creativity, leads to a symbiosis with Nature, the Spiritual, and
Culture.--

By spending our sacred hours contemplating the beauty of perennial nature and the
masterpieces of universal literature, we will discover our title to nobility and become a
child of nature - adopted into the real aristocracy of the great thinkers of all ages.--
ebs

... "The Great Agents of Nature are indestructible."--

... "natural history" was commonly the consoling joy of finding the
perfections of a benevolent Creator in nature.... it was evolution, not a divine
intelligence, that has created all nature.--

To live according to Nature is to live according to a man’s whole nature, not
according to a part of it, and to reverence the divinity within him as the governor of all
his actions. “To the rational animal the same act is according to nature and
according to reason. That which is done contrary to reason is also an act contrary to
nature, to the whole nature, though it is certainly conformable to some part of man’s
nature, or it could not be done. Man is made for action, not for idleness or pleasure.--

The end of a man is, as already explained, to live conformably to nature, and he will
thus obtain happiness, tranquillity of mind, and contentment. As a means of living
conformably to nature he must study the four chief virtues, each of which has its proper
sphere: wisdom, or the knowledge of good and evil; justice, or the
giving to every man his due; fortitude, or the enduring of labour and pain; and temperance, which is moderation in all things.--

Again I say that each and every Negro, during the last 300 years, possesses from that heritage a greater burden of hate for America than they themselves know. Perhaps it is well that Negroes try to be as unintellectual as possible, for if they ever started really thinking about what happened to them they'd go wild. And perhaps that is the secret of whites who want to believe that Negroes really have no memory; for if they thought that Negroes remembered, they would start out to shoot them all in sheer self-defense.--

Neoliberalism - A political theory of the late 1900s holding that personal liberty is maximized by limiting government interference in the operation of free markets.--

Neoliberalism and globalization are zombie ideologies. They have no credibility left. The scam has been found out. The global oligarchs are hated and reviled. The elite has no counterargument to our critique. So they can’t afford to have us around. As the power elite becomes more frightened, they’re going to use harsher forms of control, including the blunt instrument of censorship and violence. - Chris Hedges--

Neurosis

The present day neurosis is caused by man's current deviations from the law of harmony
with biogenic natural and cosmic forces.--

New York Times

The New York Times reflects the thinking of the elites (affluent upper-middle class). It wholly embraces the ideology of neo-conservatism and neoliberalism. It imposes a de facto censorship to shut out critics of unfettered capitalism and imperialism, such as Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn. Newspapers like the New York Times are trapped in an old system of information they call “objectivity” and “balance,” formulae designed to cater to the powerful and the wealthy and obscure the truth.
The paper embraces, without any dissent, the utopian ideology of neoliberalism and the primacy of corporate power as an inevitable form of human progress. The Times, along with business schools, economics departments at universities, and the pundits promoted by the corporate state, propagate the absurd idea that we would all be better off if we prostrated every sector of society before the dictates of the marketplace. - Chris Hedges--

News

The commercial broadcast networks, and that includes CNN and MSNBC, are not in the business of journalism. They hardly do any. Their celebrity correspondents are courtiers to the elite. They speculate about and amplify court gossip, which is all the accusations about Russia, and they repeat what they are told to repeat. They sacrifice journalism and truth for ratings and profit. These cable news shows are one of many revenue streams in a corporate structure. They compete against other revenue streams. The head of CNN, Jeff Zucker, who helped create the fictional persona of Donald Trump on “Celebrity Apprentice,” has turned politics on CNN into a 24-hour reality show. All nuance, ambiguity, meaning and depth, along with verifiable fact, are sacrificed for salacious entertainment. Lying, racism, bigotry and conspiracy theories are given platforms and considered newsworthy, often espoused by people whose sole quality is that they are unhinged. It is news as burlesque. - Chris Hedges--

Nietzsche

... anti-democracy, anti-Christianity, anti-Judaism, anti-socialist and self-acclaimed
Anti-Christ, expressed his belief in a master race and the coming of a superman in many of
his works. In his unique aphoristic style, Nietzsche wrote in The Genealogy of Morals(III 14):--

Noam Chomsky

... we are conditioned to think about social
problems in terms of race, so for instance, when we read "underclass" we
reflexively think, inner city blacks... (Noam Chomsky says if you talk about social class
they label you a conspiracy theorist.--

... most of the books of the Old Testament were woven together from various sources
from various centuries.--

Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire
succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective
consciousness... While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical
problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the
transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind,
the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence
which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute
is found in right action.--

Orgasm

... in these ancient traditions, it was the period preceding orgasm which was
the most important - a high plateau resulting in an intensive union with the
biogenic lifestream of our planet, leading to an altered state of consciousness... an
orgasm is merely the physiological discharge of accumulated excess biogenic energy... our
ability to achieve spiritual union with the primeval lifestream of our planet - a
lifestream which is our bridge to contact the Cosmic Ocean of Life. The intensive union
achieved through caressing, gentle contact between the tender, young, biogenic grass and
our generative organs takes place during the high plateau preceding orgasm, and not only
during the orgasm itself, which is a purely physiological function.-- ebs

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) developed an "individual psychology" which argues that each individual strives for what he called "superiority," but is more commonly referred to today as "self-realization" or "self-actualization," and which was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche's notions of striving and self-creation. The entire "human potential movement" and humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, etc.) owes a great debt to this line of thought. Even pop psychologists of "self-esteem" preach a gospel little different from that of Zarathustra. The ruthless, self-assertive "objectivism" of Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is difficult to imagine without the influence of Nietzsche.--

If you can't see the past you can't see the future. If you can't see the relationship between the present and the past, you can't understand where the present might go. Who controls the past controls the present, who controls the present controls the future, as George Orwell said. This is succinct explanation of the ways in which power functions.--

Peace

The Sevenfold Peace can be achieved only by ourselves and through our own efforts; it
is impossible to attain in any other way, by laws, conventions, or enforcement's in our
chaotic world.--

We see this thing of lost certainty and splendor not only stated by all the religions
of man throughout history, but also again and again even in nonreligious intellectual
history. It is from the reminiscence theory of the Platonic Dialogues, that
everything new is really a recalling of a lost better world, all the way to Rousseau's
complaint of the corruption of natural man by the artificialities of civilization. And we
see it also in the modern scientisms I have mentioned: in Marx's assumption of a lost
"social childhood of mankind where mankind unfolds in complete beauty," so clearly stated in his earlier writings, an innocence corrupted by money, a paradise to be regained. Or in the Freudian emphasis on the deep-seatedness of neurosis in civilization and of dreadful primordial acts and wishes in both our racial and individual pasts; and by
inference a previous innocence, quite unspecified, to which we return through psychoanalysis. Or in behaviorism, if less distinctly, in the undocumented faith that it
is the chaotic reinforcements of development and the social process that must be
controlled and ordered to return man to a quite unspecified ideal before these
reinforcements had twisted his true nature awry.-- Julian Jaynes--

Philosophy: "an activity that through discussion and reasoning secures the happy
life." (Epicurus)--

"Our only occupation should be the cure of ourselves."--

Photography

Kirlian photography: In 1939, Semyon Kirlian discovered by accident that if an object
on a photographic plate is subjected to a high-voltage electric field, an image is created
on the plate. The image looks like a colored halo or coronal discharge. This image is said
to be a physical manifestation of the spiritual aura or "life force" which
allegedly surrounds each living thing.

Pity

A man loses power when he pities.--

Plato

It is from the reminiscence theory of the Platonic Dialogues, that everything
new is really a recalling of a lost better world.--

Poetry

Poetry began with the bicameral mind.--

... all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by
art, but because they are inspired and possessed... there is no invention in him until he
has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him.--

Poems are rafts clutched at by men drowning in inadequate minds.--

Police

Criminal policy, as sociologist Alex S. Vitale writes in his new book, "The End of Policing," "is structured around the use of punishment to manage the ‘dangerous classes,’ masquerading as a system of justice.”--

... the basic nature of the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo.--

We live in a two-tiered legal system, one in which poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes - which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by a New York City policeman in 2014 - while crimes of appalling magnitude that wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines and civil enforcement.--

The problem is not ultimately in policing techniques and procedures; it is in the increasing reliance on the police as a form of social control to buttress a system of corporate capitalism that has turned the working poor into modern-day serfs and abandoned whole segments of the society. Government no longer makes any attempt to ameliorate racial and economic inequality. Instead, it criminalizes poverty. It has turned the poor into one more cash crop for the rich.--

Crime and Punishment in Black America” echo Vitale’s point that the war on drugs “has never been about public health or public safety. It’s been about providing a cover for aggressive and invasive policing that targets almost exclusively people of color.”

A genuine populism, one defined and often articulated by Bernie Sanders, could sweep the Democratic Party back into power. Regulating Wall Street, publicly financing campaigns, forgiving student debt, demanding universal health care, bailing out homeowners victimized by the banks, ending the wars in the Middle East, instituting a jobs program to repair our decaying infrastructure, dismantling the prison system, restoring the rule of law on the streets of our cities, making college education free and protecting programs such as Social Security would see election victory after election victory.--

Verily, he who possesseth little is much the less possessed: blessed be moderate
poverty!--

A man is poor because of wrong attitudes of thinking, feeling and acting.-- ebs

... we are so materialistic poverty now actually
carries the shame that cowardice carried in earlier, warrior times.--

The poor have always been demonized.--

We are back to the dogma that whatever the wealthy do is good for the poor.--

Lower ranking humans throw themselves into submission, even sacrificing themselves for their high superiors. It's all biologically evolved behavior.--

Property is a legal instrument of oppression. And there is class warfare.--

Poor people of all races now have little chance of ever making it up to the middle class - for a complex of reasons including economic: the loss of jobs as capitalism goes global; technological: the sudden demands of computer skills at work; and attitude: Americans are really unsure of they want to provide equality of opportunity, because they believe a market economy thrives better on inequality... they are going to let poverty be a goad.--

... pain and suffering are good because they goaded the poor into greater efforts, thus
the economy is energized.--

Poverty was a creation of what "is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state.... The life of an Indian is a continual holiday, compared with the poor of Europe."--

Poverty is not God's will. It is an artificial, humanly produced blight.--

Prayer

The very exaltation of the god, and indeed the very idea of divine worship, is
in contrast to the more matter-of-fact everyday relationship of god and man a thousand
years earlier.--

Priests

Priests see life as suffering, and so want to
make others suffer as well. The uncertainty and hardships of life are too much for them,
and so they have given up on life. They are little more than corpses, believing that their
God and their pity are an escape.--

... a priest is and remains a human sacrifice.--

Prince

'It is the fate of princes to be ill spoken of for well-doing.'--

Propaganda

The rise of mass propaganda signaled the primacy of Freud, who had discovered that the manipulation of powerful myths and images, playing to subconscious fears and desires, could lead men and women to embrace their own subjugation and even self-destruction. What Freud and the great investigators of mass psychology realized was that the emotions were not subordinate to reason. If anything it was the reverse.--

The best propaganda is that which, as it were, works invisibly, penetrates the whole of life without the public having any knowledge of the propagandistic initiative.--

Propaganda by the deed

The idea of Mikhail Bakunin’s “propaganda by deed” .... only acts of extreme violence could reveal to the world a desperate social situation and the moral integrity of those determined to challenge it.--

Property

The rich began to regard their property as an end in itself, to be held forever, as if the Creator had opened a land office issuing title deeds in perpetuity.--

"The accumulation of personal property,"Paine explained," is, in many instances, the effects of paying too little for the labour that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence."--

... psychoanalysis... like Marxism, demands total commitment, initiation procedures, a
worshipful relation to its canonical texts, and gives in return that same assistance in
decision and direction in life which a few centuries ago was the province of religion.--

Evolutionary psychology holds that our daily routines and our choices are not nearly as spontaneous as we think because our behavior and our emotions are determined by the long tracks of natural selection... we are more instinct than we think.--

... sociobiology and evolutionary psychology will set new standards of indifference.--

... humans will always choose pleasure over pain. Lecky found people suffering with low self-concepts are the exception, they seek confirmation of their low belief in themselves - which is to say, given a choice, they will rather be in the company of a person who puts them down.... Apparently, more important than pleasure is to be with somebody who verifies the way you see yourself.--

Beware of psychological toxins... Be an optimist and have confidence in yourself, in
human progress and in the healing forces of nature.--

The loss of racial identity means a loss of values and the psychological/moral
dislocation that has scourged our people for the past few generations.--

There is no racial justice without economic justice.--

Racist

Racism was not some backward-looking reactionary ideology; the scientifically uneducated embraced it as enthusiastically as people today accept the theory of man-made global warming. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that eugenics and the related concept of 'racial hygiene' were finally discredited with the realization that genetic differences between the races are relatively small, and the variations within races quite large.--

Radical

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.--

Reason

"Men who are governed by reason desire for themselves nothing which they do not
also desire for the rest of mankind, and consequently are just, faithful, and honorable in
their conduct."--

Rebellion

One of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity... It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.--

The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage - anger at the way things are and the courage to change them. The rebel knows that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion justifies itself.--

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop," Mario Savio said on the steps of Sproul Hall at Berkeley during a sit-in on December 2, 1964. "And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at al1."--

We must become, as Camus said, so absolutely free that "existence is an act of rebellion."--

Reformers

Seemingly insurmountable obstacles confront all world reformers, when pure idea meets
the opposing force in the inertia of the human mind and the resistance of entrenched
power. It represents a revolution of the dynamic against the static, of higher values
against pseudo-values, of freedom against slavery, and it is not limited to one time in
history, nor to mankind as a whole, but occurs repeatedly in the life of individual
man.--ebs

Religion

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.--

"Kings could not exist without priests," he used to say. "Their trades exactly fit each other. First enslave the mind, and the slavery of the body follows as natural as the shadow its object."

Republicans

Republicans do not believe that people can work together and help each other so they do
not believe in government and law. Instead they believe in a dog-eat-dog, everyone
on-their-own and out-for-themselves society where the strongest survive and it doesn't
matter what happens to everyone else. So whenever conservatives gain power they abuse it
and use it to get money for themselves and their friends.--

The Republican Party is actively grinding us.--

Resistance

There is a false left/right paradigm which diverts the working class from the real reasons for their hardships.--

Revenge

To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.--

Revolution

It is impossible to predict the time and progress of revolution. It is governed by its own more or less mysterious laws. But when it comes, it moves irresistibly. - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin--

The overarching demand is to end corporate rule, shift power to the people.--

Revolutionary activity, Bakunin correctly observed, was best entrusted to those who had no property, no regular employment, and no stake in the status quo.--

“To destroy a people,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn noted acidly, “you must sever their roots.” The wretched of the earth, as Frantz Fanon called them, have been shorn of any ideological or cultural cohesion. They are cut off from their past. They live in crushing poverty, numbing alienation, hopelessness and often terror. Mass culture feeds them the tawdry, the violent, the salacious and the ridiculous. They are rising up against these forces of modernization, driven by an atavistic fury to destroy the technocratic world that condemns them.
- Chris Hedges--

“We’re at that point where Mother Earth is crying out for a revolution. Mother Earth is crying out for a new direction.”--

Revolt

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from one another. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual beings will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that "one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not inspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it."--

Rich

More biology: the way the superrich have isolated themselves for centuries now qualifies them as a "pseudospecies". By hanging out and mating only with their own kind, over many generations, they have effectively removed themselves from the gene pool.--

'Behind every fortune there's an undiscovered crime.'--

There is something wrong with the creation of this world, because the rich people think that they are the benefactors of the poor, but in fact those rich are fed and dressed by the work of these poor and live in luxury created for them by the poor.--

Rituals

Rituals are behavioral metaphors, belief acted, divination foretold, exopsychic
thinking. Rituals are mnemonic devices for the great narratizations at the heart of church
life.--

Rousseau

... Rousseau's complaint of the corruption of natural man by the
artificialities of civilization.--

Rule

It is as wrong for one person to rule many as it is for many to rule one.--

... some of the fundamental, most characteristic, and most commonly observed
symptoms of florid unmedicated schizophrenia are uniquely consistent with the description
I have given on previous pages of the bicameral mind.--

... radically different reaction to stress... what biological advantage did it once
have?--

... schizophrenics are almost drowning in sensory data. Unable to narratize or
conciliate, they see every tree and never the forest.--

... schizophrenia may be related to an earlier organization of the human brain which I
have called the bicameral mind.--

For schizophrenia, whether one illness or many, is in its florid stage practically
defined by certain characteristics which we have stated earlier were the salient
characteristics of the bicameral mind. The presence of auditory hallucinations, their
often religious and always authoritative quality, the dissolution of the ego or analog
'I', and of the mind-space in which it once could narratize out what to do and where it
was in time and action, these are the large resemblances.--

Today science has tectonic credibility. It is unimpeachable. If a layman attacks science, nobody listens.--

... we should not let the authority of science shut us up.--

Scientific Materialism

Fed up with Hegelian idealism and its pseudoreligious interpretations of material
matters, they angrily resolved that no forces other than common physiochemical ones would
considered in their scientific activity. No spiritual entities. No divine substances. No
vital forces. This was the most coherent and shrill statement of scientific materialism up
to that time. And enormously influential.--

Scientism

... the modern intellectual landscape is informed with the same needs, and often in its
larger contours goes through the same quasi-religious gestures, though in a slightly
disguised form. These scientisms, as I shall call them, are clusters of scientific ideas
which come together and almost surprise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific
mythologies which fill the very void left by the divorce of science and religion in our
time. They differ from the classical science and its common debates in the way they evoke
the same response as did the religions which they seek to supplant. And they share with
religions many of their most obvious characteristics: a reational splendor that explains
everything, a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly visible and
beyond criticism, a series of canonical texts which are somehow outside the usual arena of
scientific criticism, certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation, and a
requirement of total commitment. In return the adherent receives what the religions had
once given him more universally: a world view, a hierarchy of importances, and an auguring
place where he may find out what to do and think, in short, a total explanation of man.
And this totality is obtained not by actually explaining everything, but by an encasement
of its activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention, such that everything that
is not explained is not in view.--

Selfishness

... humans are fundamentally selfish and egoistic and that they don’t care about
society-as-a-whole.--

Self-doubt

We are learned in self-doubt, scholars of our very failures, geniuses at excuse and
tomorrowing our resolves. And so we become practiced in powerless resolution until hope
gets undone and dies in the unattempted. At least that happens to some of us. And then to
rise above this noise of knowings and really change ourselves, we need an authorization
that 'we' do not have.--

Self-esteem

... humans will always choose pleasure over pain. Lecky found people suffering with low self-concepts are the exception, they seek confirmation of their low belief in themselves - which is to say, given a choice, they will rather be in the company of a person who puts them down... Apparently, more important than pleasure is to be with somebody who verifies the way you see yourself.--

Beware of psychological toxins... Be an optimist and have confidence in yourself, in
human progress and in the healing forces of nature.--

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) developed an "individual psychology" which argues that each individual strives for what he called "superiority," but is more commonly referred to today as "self-realization" or "self-actualization," and which was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche's notions of striving and self-creation. The entire "human potential movement" and humanistic psychology (Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Rollo May, etc.) owes a great debt to this line of thought. Even pop psychologists of "self-esteem" preach a gospel
little different from that of Zarathustra. The ruthless, self-assertive "objectivism" of Ayn Rand (1905-1982) is difficult to imagine without the influence of Nietzsche.--

Many people suffer from impaired self-esteem; they need to work on being proud of
themselves.--

Sexuality is not the opposite of virtue, but a natural gift that needs to be developed
and integrated into a healthy, rounded life.--

Sincerity

The Essenes believed that sincerity - the ability to evaluate oneself honestly without
rationalizing or justifying the things one does or says or thinks - is, above all else,
the path which leads to Eternal Life.

Slavery

Florida has been "ground zero for modern slavery" in America.--

Better to go hungry with dignity than to eat one’s fill in slavery.--

Social Change

The best opportunities for radical social change exist among the poor, the homeless, the working class, and the destitute. As the numbers of disenfranchised dramatically increase, our only hope is to connect our¬selves with the daily injustices visited upon the weak and the outcast. Out of this contact we can resurrect, from the ground up, a social ethic, a new movement. We must hand out bowls of soup. Coax the homeless into a shower. Make sure those who are mentally ill, cruelly abandoned on city sidewalks, take their medication. We must go back into America's segregated schools and prisons. We must protest, learn to live simply and begin, in an age of material and imperial decline, to speak with a new humility. It is in the tangible, mundane, and difficult work of forming groups and communities to care for others that we will kindle the outrage and the moral vision to fight back, that we will articulate an alternative.--

Social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it.--

Lacking any positive beliefs or needs, people will aim for comfort and to struggle as
little as possible... we will all become the same... mediocre..--

Those who are strong enough struggle. Those who are not strong give up and turn to
religion, nationalism, democracy, or some other means of escape.--

The state has become the new idol that the masses worship. It encourages uniformity and mediocrity, pandering to the masses. Freedom can only be found outside the confines of the state.--

... all the values in which mankind at present summarizes its highest aspirations are decadence values.--

The individual feels more and more disoriented, confused, without direction, because
all the means to satisfy his basic individual needs are out of his control and he is
helpless in an apparently irremediable slavery of social exploitation by big business, big
unions, and big governments, as well as by his own self-exploitation: due to ignorance, he
sacrifices real values, like health, time, and peace of mind, for superfluous and harmful
things he does not really need.-- ebs

The structure of society may be more permissive, but the new absence of rules leads not
to a sense of freedom, but only to confusion... a century of increasing madness... chained
in bondage of an Egypt of unemployment, crime, pollution, inflation, taxes, debts - all
the miseries of life in an age of uncertainty - a life most often spent in constant fear
of the unknown future... Instead of being dependent on pills, drugs, alcohol, and junk
food to dull the pain of being alive during the latter part of the twentieth century -
instead of fighting the madness and trying to conquer the world - we shall try to meditate, to find ourselves and the true meaning of life, which is still eternal and
inviolate behind all the noise and confusion of the twentieth century... remove ourselves
from the madly revolving wheel of self-exploitation... By spending our sacred hours
contemplating the beauty of perennial nature and the masterpieces of universal literature,
we will discover our title to nobility and become a child of nature - adopted into the
real aristocracy of the great thinkers of all ages.-- ebs

... survival through creative simplicity and self-sufficiency.

The present day neurosis is caused by man's current deviations from the law of harmony
with biogenic natural and cosmic forces.-- ebs

The gradual development of centralization in Western civilization has progressively
disorganized the little communities which previously existed in every country... steady
disintegration of the small community, and within the community, the family unit. These
frameworks of human cooperation have almost entirely disappeared and instead we have an
exclusive centralization of life based on the competitive tendency of the individual.--
ebs

Herbert Spencer... tells us we don't have to feel guilty if we are brutal with each other - animals do it. It gives comfort to perpetrators of social injustice--

America is gradually returning to a "debt peonage" society, after a practice in the post-Civil War South, in which debtors were forced to work for creditors.--

Sometimes exploited humans do nothing but adjust.--

... in a civilized society, there is a basic duty to protect the vulnerable. Exploitation is violating this duty.--

... we are conditioned to think about social problems in terms of race, so for instance, when we read "underclass" we reflexively think, inner city blacks... (Noam Chomsky says if you talk about social class they label you a conspiracy theorist.--

Poor people of all races now have little chance of ever making it up to the middle class - for a complex of reasons including economic: the loss of jobs as capitalism goes global; technological: the sudden demands of computer skills at work; and attitude: Americans are really unsure of they want to provide equality of opportunity, because they believe a market economy thrives better on inequality.--

Middle-class Americans, who believe in meritocracy, and who cling to myths of self-reliance and freedom, find it difficult to accept the idea of these "poverty traps"- middle class people are always pointing to an ancestor of theirs a century ago who worked their way up from the slums to success - but those were times when education was not a requisite. With today's technology a poor education really is a suffocating disability. And that is what the poor get in these neighborhoods. But that is interpreted as the free market.--

... humans are fundamentally selfish and egoistic and that they don’t care about
society-as-a-whole.--

If the student pursues the study of economics he will eventually read texts containing
"Indifference Curves" which show the economy actually does better with social
inequality.--

In our own society, we love competition and we promote inequality... we have become a
steeply hierarchical society, and this is with popular support. We are choosing inequality
through government economic policies that chronically distributed wealth unfairly.--

... This type of rare and heavily publicized humane event, fed to a sensation-hungry
press, creates a "sufficiency paradox", an "illusion of sufficiency" (46)
that the goodness is there for us all. Generalized, this creates the illusion of
abundance. The media deal in demonstrations of sudden and spectacular humanity. But for
every person who gets the rare benefit, many others do not. A life-saving kidney goes to
one of several people in need, and the life-taking decision about the others is not
publicized. The "illusion of sufficiency" device massively confuses possibility with probability but on a societal level, it is a media-promoted and effective manipulation of hope... We too use Potemkin villages.--

... "the Kafkaesque cost of being in a process without knowing how to help oneself" (47). If people compared our national inequities in wealth with the insight that, through decided levels of scarcity, the aggregate amount of suffering is controlled, public emotion could erupt.--

... First Rawls insists that in addition to freedom and equality, there must be a prior value in democracy, rationality and justice should forever be opposed.

Rawls insists on a shift in focus. We should not judge a culture by how its topmost members are doing, but by how it treats its lowest. His solutions follow. First, this society should decide how low any member can go. That establishes minimum rights. It requires we identify the least-advantaged person in society, and draw focus to him. Next, the very top and the very bottom of society should be (and all intermediate levels should be) connected, as if by a loose linked chain. Then if the top rises, it pulls the bottom up with it. If the bottom moves up, that closes the gap toward equality. This arrangement does not prevent any upward rise; but it establishes consequences on movements at the top.--

Federal Reserve and Congress should be guided in their policy actions by what's happening at the bottom of society, not by the bubble at the top... Greed has to be reinstalled as a moral wrong, and in religious circles, as a sin... "Who am I to judge?"... Comfort only brings inaction, nonjudgmentalism is moral vacuum.--

... systematic study and thoughtful reading. Such activity is more agreeable and fruitful if pursued together with those who are similarly interested. Discussion and study in groups or circles should be encouraged because it develops social outlook and responsibility.

The soul is social consciousness incarnate in the individual, and so it opposes the body which is the foundation of our individuality.--

Sociobiology

... sociobiology and evolutionary psychology will set new standards of indifference.--

Sociopath

... "persistent, repetitive, remorseless violators of the rights of others, and the rules of society"--

In corporate maneuvering they have no loyalty, virtually no emotion, and no conscience. Promiscuous in friendships as in sex, they start instantly and leave an alliance instantly it creates advantage. Their specialty is stirring and steering feelings in others without being touched themselves. Usually the epitome of self control, they are capable if cornered of sudden viciousness. Few will challenge them, sensing that underneath is their calculated enjoyment of the destruction and humiliation of others... "Lying comes as easily as breathing,"... they process emotions in the temporal lobe where most people solve algebra problems... Democracy is something a sociopath loathes, because it represents public constraint by 'little people' on his autocratic power.--

If the consequences of greed are harm and pain, it is immoral. If greed is flaunted,
when the pain is known, it is also sociopathic.--

Soul

The soul of the good person is harmoniously balanced under his enjoyable pursuit of
knowledge.--

... to live in it in voluntary simplicity and spiritual awareness of nature, combined
with intellectual creativity, leads to a symbiosis with Nature, the Spiritual, and
Culture.-- ebs

State, The

... the cultural and religious reformers of the early twentieth century unwittingly laid the foundations for their own dissolution. By extolling the power of the state as an agent of change, by accepting that increased comfort and consumption were the defining measures of human progress, they abetted the consumer society and the cult of the self, as well as the ascendancy of the corporate state. The trust in the beneficence of the state, which led most of these liberal reformers naively to back the war effort, ceded uncontested power to the state during the war, especially the power to shape and mold public perceptions. The state, once it held these powers, never gave them up.
The liberal class had placed its faith in the inevitability of human progress and abandoned the values, as Macdonald pointed out, that should have remained at the core of its activism. Mass culture, and the state - the repository of the hopes and dreams of the liberal class - should have been seen as the enemy. The breach between the liberal class and the radical social and political movements it once supported or sympathized with was total. This rupture has left the liberal class without a repository of new ideas.--

We endure more state control than at any time in U.S. history.--

"What's necessary for the state is the illusion of normality, of regularity," America's best-known political prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, told me last week by phone from the prison where he is incarcerated in Frackville, Pa. ".... In Rome, what the emperors needed was bread and circuses. In America, what we need is 'Housewives of Atlanta.' We need sports. The moral stories of good cops and evil people. Because you have that.... there is no critical thinking in America during this period. You have emotion [only]. When I look at someone who is demonized, I can do anything [to him or her]. I can do anything. That's how the state works, by demonizing people and putting them in places where they're virtually invisible."--

Stomach

... The secretory activity of the stomach is also extremely suseptible to emotional
experience. The stomach is indeed one of the most responsive organs in the body, reacting
in its spasms and emptying and contractions and secretory activity to almost every emotion
and sensation. And this is the reason why illnesses of the gastro-intestinal system were
the first to be thought of as psychosomatic. note: Chron's disease??--

Today's civilization has become intoxicated by the superficial glitter of technological
achievements. Our minds have become weakened by the crutches of technology and
technological noise has eroded our peace of mind.-- ebs

As a society grows more technological it needs more pure intelligence to run it.--

With today's technology a poor education really is a suffocating disability.--

Technology will not deliver us equity. Logic has not delivered us equity.--

New developments bring with them changes in people's perception of right and wrong.
Furthermore, new developments create new ethical problems that society did not have to
face before.--

As we move closer to being a society in which every aspect of life depends on
information technology, we have to recognize the need for new ethical codes, and
therefore, new laws.--

Television

... the all-pervading sophisticated and deceiving promotion of television and radio have become an omnipresent menace of corruption to the public mind and body.-- ebs

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human
beings, either a liberal or a conservative.-->

Theory

... we should evaluate a theory by what it says, also by what it doesn't say.--

He had one and only one aim: to be a political writer who served ordinary citizens and the public good.--

Trump

Trump tapped into the rage & frustration of the millenials and others who see no future.--

Obama was used to appease. Trump is being used to pacify. Specifically the white working-class i.e. middle America. Trump is also useful as a convienent target (scape goat) for the left. So he's useful for the elite in providing false hope for half of the country, while being a convienent target for the other half. Very useful for the ruling class.--

Trump supporters are in denial about what a fraud he is.--

"We operate under two systems of law," said Kurski. "One is constitutional and legal. The other is unconstitutional and illegal. The problem is that the illegal and unconstitutional system runs the country."--

I seek the truth, which never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion
and ignorance which does harm.--

There are three pathways to the finding of truth. One is the path of intuition which
was followed by the mystics and prophets. Another is the pathway of nature, that of the
scientist. The third is the pathway of culture, that of great masterpieces of literature
and the arts.--

Human truths evolve like the correlative phenomena of nature, they have their birth,
growth and decline.--

The very notion of truth is a culturally given direction, a part of the pervasive
nostalgia for an earlier certainty... the search for an innocence of certainty among the
mythologies of facts.--

What is truth? For the majority of people, truth is the majority of counted votes.--

"An unemployed existence is a worse negation of life than death itself."--

Unions

The importance of unions, she argued, is that they are the body by which workers come together and understand that they are part of a class. Through struggles for reforms,
they realize their class power. Not only do workers realize their ability to win reforms, but they also learn the limitations of reforms - and the need for the actual conquest of power.--

The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1948 and the single most destructive piece of legislation to the union movement, was a product of anti-communist hysteria. When it was passed, about half of all American workers belonged to labor unions. That figure has now dropped to twelve percent.... The Taft-Hartley Act, which is still law, prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, and secondary boycotts - union strikes against employers who continue to do business with a firm that is undergoing a strike. The act forbade secondary or "common situs" picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. All union officers were forced to sign noncommunist affidavits or lose their positions. Heavy restric-tions were placed on union shops, while individual states were allowed to pass "right-to-work laws" that outlawed union shops. The Federal Government was empowered to obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike "imperiled the national health or safety." The act effectively demobilized the labor movement. It severely curtailed the ability to organize and strike and purged the last vestiges of militant labor leaders from the ranks of unions. With the passage Taft-Hartley the power of labor to fight back effectively against the cor-porate state died. Labor, once the beating heart of progressive radical movements, became as impotent as the arts, the media, the church, the universities, and the Democratic Party.--

United States

"The U.S. government has lost its moral authority," he went on:
It is corrupt to the core. It is owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street and corporate America. Its foreign policy is controlled by the Israeli lobby. It is unsustainable economically, socially, morally, militarily, and environmentally. It is ungovernable and therefore unfixable. The question is, do you go down with the Titanic or do you seek other options?--

Universe

Nothing is lost in the universe.--

... the universe is a process of continuous creation.--

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is practical, astonishingly democratic, and astonishingly rule-free. The utilitarians bluntly advised governments, let the people alone. Let them be human, doing what they do naturally... So instead of having high priests and nobility dictating values, utilitarianism promotes the values of science, which are truth, practicality and factuality.--

... utilitarianism is a philosophy with no ideals to offend anybody – just what works.--

... human values should be based not on denial ("thou shalt not") but on affirmation ("thou shalt").--

People's values are shaped by the cultures they live in; as society changes we need
changed values.--

"Values" are the death of Christian morality because values simply mean opinions. If opinion is how things are decided, then might makes right.--

Virtue

'Virtue they will but abuse, and taunt her with bitter reviling.'--

Knowledge and strength are greater virtues than humility and submission.--

The highest virtue is to be true to yourself (consider these song titles from a
generation ago: "I Gotta Be Me," "I Did It My Way").--

Violence

see 'Wretched of the Earth, The' by Frantz Fanon

Everything formed by violence is senseless and useless. It exists without a future. It leaves behind nothing but death, grief, and destruction.--

"At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them and restores their self-confidence."--

... walking "oils the joints"... connection between walking and a calm
conscience. It makes the mind clear and ordered, dispels resentment, inspires good
resolutions. Writers and artists do their best work while walking. e.g. Nietzsche--

War

The reason which governments give for wars are always screens, behind
which lie completely different reasons and motives.--

Permanent war, which reduces all to speaking in the simplified language of nationalism, is a disease. It strips citizens of rights. It reduces all communication to patriotic cant. It empowers those who profit from the state in the name of war. And it corrodes and diminishes democratic debate and institutions.--

War propaganda not only bolstered support for the war - including among progressives and intellectuals - but also discredited dissidents and reformers as traitors.--

"Mass murders occur, which is what war is, because people are split and don't think... when the government does not serve the people, then it doesn't deserver to be obeyed.... To be patriotic, you may have to be against your government."--

War is the pornography of violence.--

War is "the art of conquering at home."--

In war, society's institutions, including our religious institutions, which mould us into compliant citizens, are unmasked. This betrayal is so deep that many veterans never find their way back to faith in the nation or in any god. They nurse a self-destructive anger and resentment, understandable and justified, but also crippling. Ask a combat veteran struggling to piece his or her life together about God and watch the raw vitriol and pain pour out. They have seen into the corrupt heart of America, into the emptiness of its most sacred institutions, into our staggering hypocrisy, and those of us who refuse to heed their words become complicit in the evil they denounce.--

American imperialism is the “cockpit of international war planning”.--

By one estimate this nation has been at war 214 out of the 228 years since the Constitution took effect — that’s 94 percent of the time — and there were wars during the Articles of Confederation period too. Contrary to popular misconception, the war state did not begin in 1945. From the start, war was an acceptable means to national policy ends, whether to open markets or to install friendly regimes.... Do Americans have any clue? The information is readily available, but you have to want to look for it. Most do not. They don’t want to know the truth. They’d rather laud “the troops” for their heroism and hear pundits describe America as a “force for good in the world.” It’s a state-worshiping worldview that resembles religion from which the ruling elite profits politically and financially.--

Filth, terrible illnesses, hunger, fire, destruction, evil - this is military glory, this is war.--

Wealth

Add little to little and it will become great. Work with work upon work to gain
wealth.--

Wealth will be redistributed, either by politics, or by revolution.--

Welfare

The transition to republican democracy - Paine spoke from his experiences in Lewes - requires in particular the building up of welfare institutions catering to the social rights of citizens. The elderly, the widowed, women, newly married couples, the poor and the unemployed, disbanded soldiers, and children, who would be required to attend school, must all be provided with state transfer payments. These would be paid for through general taxation and considered "not of the nature of a charity, but of a right."--

Hope and joy bring the dying back to life... Keep a watch on your thoughts, brush aside
all feeling of depression and discouragement, and close the door to doubt, morbid fancies
and every kind of phobia... "The troubles of life and pain are easy to bear when they
are not exaggerated by dwelling on them. Thinking makes it so."... The depressing effects of physical conditions, of climate, and daily intercourse with unbalanced people must be combated by an unshakable optimism. We succeed in this by cultivating the will... we must master life and dispassionately control our actions.--

... what destroys balance in a man is an attitude of mind which dwells on evil at the
expense of good.--

Will to Power

The will to power suggests that the universe is in a constant state of change, so that there is no such thing as being; there is only a state of becoming.--

... the will to power explains continuing chaos.--

The "superior person" was one who could rise above the limitations of ordinary morality.--

Wisdom

Only by attaining a degree of wisdom is it possible for an individual to learn to hold
only good thoughts in his consciousness and to refuse to entertain negative, destructive
thoughts about any person, place, condition, or thing. The Essenes believed we should
always try to strengthen what is good in everyone and everything we contact; by doing
this, and ignoring what is bad, the bad will become weaker and weaker and finally
disappear entirely. This is the practical reality of wisdom.-- ebs

In any such situation, where something is so resistant to even the beginnings of
clarity, it is wisdom to begin by determining what that something is not.--

When you fall ill, your body is trying to tell you something; listen to the wisdom of
your body.--

Wisdom: vision of the cosmos as it is & a mode of living in accord with cosmic
logos; to be properly at home in self, city & world.--

Women

Women are not capable of friendship, only love.--

... by attempting to masculinise woman, and to feminise men, we jeopardise the future
of our people.--

"When thou goest to woman to teach, forget not thy whip" or "Thou goest to woman? Do not forget thy whip." (note: When he says bring your whip, he means that he believes women enjoy men dominating them.) also: And thus spoke the little old woman, "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip."--

... women... they "put on something" even when they take off everything.--

Work is an individual's contribution to society and a precondition of happiness for all
concerned.--

... to work for someone, I will enter some sort of hierarchy. And if I go to work for someone, somewhere, I am also selling my personal freedom for a wage... So most work sites create the opposite of the two basic values of democracy which are freedom and equality--

... the more people work, the more people are enmeshed in a system of control which is nondemocratic... there seemed no purpose to the authoritarianism of managers except to create a culture of extreme inequality... produced the feeling of failure and shame... eventually workers think so little of their own worth that they accept the low pay... "We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship."--

Horatio Alger's children's books from the 1800s tell the story of a boy from ragged tenement origins who struggles from poverty up to riches in an urban odyssey of unflagging effort, single-minded ambition, determination, tenacity and hard work. The boy hero meets tyrannical employers, jealous competitors, wily criminals, prejudice and derision of the poor. He defeats mountainous odds to emerge finally on top, financially successful, pulling his own mother up out of poverty, and this all with his good character intact, in a world where the good guys always win.

The youngest minds get molded around the idea that this sort of ambition makes a person invincible. This myth instills a trust in long term, hard work ...

Tom Sawyer... it values slyness over effort, and it makes a clear point of getting ahead by exploiting one's friends. Despite the phosphorescent prose, this tale is about skimming and suckers in a world where the good guys do not win. In it, winners are people who subtly know how to manipulate the wants of others...

It would be nice if children generalized from Alger and colored themselves all industrious, righteous, honest, rational and forward thinking. But growing up, some of us have absorbed the point that hard work is for dupes, and that out of the sleeve of ambition comes the hand of greed.--

Worship

The very exaltation of the god, and indeed the very idea of divine worship, is in contrast to the more matter-of-fact everyday relationship of god and man a thousand years earlier.--

... Zarathustra's basic attitude is eternal vigilance as the price of vitality,
happiness and wisdom... Zarathustra adopts a dynamic attitude of eternal vigilance, which
will prevent even the appearance of evil, and, if evil has crept in, will fight and
destroy it.--

... "in this small grain of wheat are contained all the laws of the universe and
the forces of nature."--

Evil exists not: only the past. The past is past, the present is a moment, the future
is all! - Zarathustra--

Hitler had Thus Spoke Zarathustra issued to every soldier in the German army.--